1. Corpora: a key part of a materials writer’s toolkit
Julie Moore
MATSDA, Liverpool
18 June, 2016

2. Corpus tools for ELT writers
What are corpus tools?
Using a corpus to help you write
What a corpus isn’t very good for
Ways of accessing corpora
A few other nifty vocab tools

3. corpus (noun)
plural corpora
corpus tools

4. concordance concordance lines KWIC: key word in context
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concordance lines
KWIC: key word in context

5. Questions for the corpus
How do we actually use must naturally (as opposed to have to)?
Do we say keep your temper?
Which is most common in British English; beat around the bush or beat about the bush?
Would you say ‘listen on headphones’ or ‘listen with headphones’?
Do we use the word actor (for a woman) instead of actress now?

6. Searching for authentic examples
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7. Searching for authentic examples
Find a ready-to-use example that fits perfectly!
All entries must include name, phone and .
Adapt/abridge a corpus example
To comment, you must log in.
Use the corpus examples as a template to create your own example
Your application must include your name and address.

8. Collocation searches Do we say keep your temper?
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9. Collocation searches
Do we say keep your temper?

10. Searching for phrases and chunks
beat around the bush or beat about the bush?
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11. Searching for phrases and chunks
beat around the bush or beat about the bush?
All regions
British English only
enTenTen via Sketch Engine

12. Choosing the best search
listen on headphones or listen with headphones?
1 A collocation search:

13. Choosing the best search
listen on headphones or listen with headphones?
2 A phrase search:

14. Choosing the best search
listen on headphones or listen with headphones?
2 A phrase search:
its easier to pick out stuff when you're listening on headphones I was home and listening to music on headphones in the living room
If you are listening to music with headphones, the music should be quiet enough … I strongly suggest you listen with headphones, and listen several times
Whether they read it on a Kindle or they listen to it through their headphones I'd discovered the audio recordings which can be listened to through headphones

15. What a corpus isn’t so good at …
Searching for language features that don’t involve specific lexis:
e.g. present continuous for future plans, second conditional, etc.
Longer examples & complete texts:
© copyright and permissions rules apply

16. A couple of caveats Know your corpus: Don’t follow blindly:
spoken vs written
genre mix
AmE vs BrE
expert vs student
Don’t follow blindly:
question surprising results
you only get what you search for
there aren’t always clear-cut answers
remember your audience & aims

17. Accessing a corpus
Ask your publisher: OUP, CUP, Macmillan, Pearson, Collins
Free open corpora: COCA, SkELL, BAWE/BASE …
Subscription corpora: Sketch Engine, Collins Corpus*

18. And a few other nifty tools …
Textcheckers
English Vocab Profile, AWL, Oxford 3000™

19. And a few other nifty tools …
Textcheckers
English Vocab Profile, AWL, Oxford 3000™
Usage trends
Ngram, COBUILD online

20. And a few other nifty tools …
Textcheckers
English Vocab Profile, AWL, Oxford 3000™
Usage trends
Ngram, COBUILD online
Dictionaries
thesaurus, advanced searches

21. Links & refs:
Corpora:
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
Sketch Engine for Language Learning (SkELL):
British Academic Written/Spoken English (BAWE/BASE):
Sketch Engine (subscription):
Other tools:
Vocab Kitchen (text checker):
Ngram viewer:
Collins COBUILD (usage graphs):
mawsig.iatefl.org
lexicoblog.blogspot.com ELTjuleswords @lexicojules