Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

Corpora can be amazingly powerful tools to determine whether two words work together nicely or whether the word or phrase you want to use is appropriate for the meaning you intend and the context in which you want to use it. Here is an overview of some of the most useful and powerful corpora that I know.  Many props to Mark Davies and the scholars at Brigham Young University for making it and sharing it: https://corpus.byu.edu/variation.asp#x2 And here are some useful corpora: https://books.google.com/ngrams https://www.wordandphrase.info/frequencyList.asp https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ For years, I used the corpora with just really basic searches, and there are great things you can learn, but recently I finally watched some tutorials and there is SO MUCH MORE you can do!  Watch this Youtube tutorial to better understand how to use COCA: How to Use the COCA And this one to see how to analyze longer passages (reading or your own essay writing) using Word and Phrase:...

You know how a lot of times students need more examples in context for a new word or phrase?  And a lot of times there are weird collocations that you just need to see in different contexts to understand?  Corpora can give you tons of real in-context examples for any given word or phrase.  They can do a lot of other stuff too, but I'm still learning to work with them. One that I've started using are Brigham Young University's Corpus of Contemporary American English , also known as COCA. It's great!  Just click the link above, click "Enter," and search something that might trip a student up, like "wont to" or "despite."  Then click on the blue link that pops up, and you've got hundreds of in-context examples!  You can see what words go with them, how they're punctuated, and students can come up with their own rules to use those words. Maybe more exciting is this translation corpus: Linguee .  You can translate tricky words an...