Corpus tools
An overview of the tools and corpora used in this e-book
Elen Le Foll
The chapters of this book make use of different corpus tools and functions. If you are interested in learning how to use a specific tool or would like to use a specific corpus, you may find this list of the chapters sorted by the tools and corpora they rely on helpful.
English-corpora.org (formally BYU)
- Free basic access to all users and corpora (with a limited, but usually sufficient, number of queries).
- Registration required.
- Option to upgrade to premium individual or academic licenses.
With the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
- How to do data-driven learning (DDL) with secondary school pupils to improve their writing by Katharina Busmann
- Learning words and collocations independently: Rising temperatures and climate science by Lena Janzen and Lisa Hörnschemeyer
- Act responsible, think sustainable – Expanding vocabulary to write about sustainability by Rieke Stahnke, Marlena Wegesin, and Lara Brede
With the British National Corpus (BNC1994):
- Differences in the grammatical structures of ‘tell’ and ‘say’ by Geeske Dünnhaupt and Lena Haase
With the Corpus of American Soap Operas:
- “How’s the weather?”: Talking about the weather in the primary EFL classroom by Jana Küpers and Nele Lange
- “Let’s have a party!”: Teaching students how to express, accept and refuse invitations by Selke Tombrägel
With the News on the Web (NOW) corpus:
- Teaching neologisms using corpus tools by Sarah Winkelmann and Nicol Sperling
- Building a corpus to create materials for a debate on pollution by Marie Gröninger and Ha Mi Nguyen
- “Black Lives Matter”: Collecting vocabulary to improve intercultural communicative competence by Tilza Maria Meise-Reckefuß
With the Wikipedia Corpus:
Sketch Engine
- Limited free trial account (30 days).
- Registration required.
- A growing number of freely accessible corpora are available for free without registration
- Many EU higher education institutions have access via the EU-funded ELEXIS project (until March 2022).
With the family of EnTenTen corpora:
- Teaching geography in English: How to describe a graph by Hanna Bavendiek and Fabian Giesholt
- “How do I get there?”: Travelling by various means of transport by Annika Liebelt and Magdalena Fuchs (also uses SKELL)
- Using corpora in the EFL classroom for creative writing by Jonas Dammann
With the British National Corpus (BNC1994):
- Commas in argumentative writing by Marie Nottmeier, Alina Sophie Peters and Lara Warnecke
With instructions to create a custom corpus from web documents:
- Exploring hospital interactions with Grey’s Anatomy by Simone Campos Silva
SKELL (Sketch Engine for language learning)
- Free and no registration required.
- Relies on a large corpus of web English.
- Also available for a number of other languages, e.g. German, French, Polish…
SKELL only gives access to one corpus:
- “How do I get there?”: Travelling by various means of transport by Annika Liebelt and Magdalena Fuchs
Of course, there are many more tools and corpora also worth exploring, many of which are listed in the appendix!
