Corpora for learning words in context

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 and see how a bunch of publications translated them as well.  It helped me so much the other day translating words from a field that was not very familiar to me.

Hope these help you!
Thanks to Julia Menéndez Jardón, Paola Prieto López, Lucía Rubio Rodríguez from the University of Utah for their presentation at TexFLEC, February 2015 in San Antonio that got me excited about Corpora.

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