English-Corpora.org: teaching and learning English

Summary

Mark Davies, the creator of English-Corpora.org, discusses the exceptional benefits and features of using their corpora for teaching and learning English. With over 85,000 monthly users, these corpora are the most widely referenced in educational books on the topic. Featuring 17 corpora including the popular Corpus of Contemporary American English (Coca), English-Corpora.org excels in providing unique tools for understanding language nuances such as formality, word usage, and collocations. By comparing word usage in different genres and exploring synonyms, collocates, and concordance lines, both learners and teachers can gain deep insights into the English language not available elsewhere. These resources help overcome the challenges of language learning by offering intuitive and detailed language analysis tools.

Highlights

• Mark Davies highlights the unique features of English-Corpora.org unavailable in other corpus websites. 🏆
• The corpora have more than 85,000 unique users monthly and are vital in educational resources on language teaching. 🌍
• Coca offers insights into language formality and is essential for understanding nuances in spoken and written English. 💬
• Exploring collocates and concordance lines reveals deep insights into word patterns and natural language use. 🔎
• English-Corpora.org allows users to explore detailed word information, enhancing learning and teaching experiences. 📘

Key Takeaways

• English-Corpora.org is a treasure trove for anyone teaching or learning English, offering unique and comprehensive language resources. 📚
• Coca, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, is the star attraction with over a billion words, offering insights into language use across different genres. 🌟
• Understanding the formality of language and finding the perfect phrase just got easier with their innovative tools. 🔍
• Collocates, concordance lines, and synonyms in English-Corpora.org provide a rich understanding of word usage and meaning. 💡
• Language learning is turbocharged with their dictionary-on-steroids approach, enabling learners to master language with precise tools. 🚀

Overview

English-Corpora.org, led by Mark Davies, is transforming the way English is taught and learned by providing unparalleled corpus resources. These tools are pivotal, as evidenced by their wide usage in language education literature over the past 15 years. With a focus on usability and depth, the corpora, especially COCA, are setting a new standard in linguistic analysis and education.

Central to their offerings is COCA, the world's most extensive online corpus. This resource is invaluable for understanding the dynamics of English language across informal and formal contexts. By analyzing word collocations, formality, and context, English-Corpora.org helps learners get a native-like grasp of English nuances, which is often a challenge in language acquisition.

English-Corpora.org stands out by equipping learners and teachers with advanced tools to explore vocabulary, synonyms, and language patterns. This dictionary-on-steroids approach makes language learning more intuitive and informed, supporting users in gaining comprehensive insights with minimal time. In essence, it bridges the gap between practical language use and academic study, making English more accessible to everyone.

English-Corpora.org: teaching and learning English Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hi I'm Mark Davies in this video we'll be discussing how the corpora from englishcorpora.org can be used for language learning and teaching and most of the features that we'll be discussing are not available from any other Corpus website first however we should recognize that the corpora from englishcorpora.org are by far the most widely used corpora for language
• 00:30 - 01:00 learning and teaching with more than 85 000 unique users each month evidence for the importance of these corporates found in the fact that nearly every book on corpora and language teaching that has been published in the last 10 to 15 years has focused on the corpora from englishcorpora.org in fact
• 01:00 - 01:30 in a recent 2023 book on teaching English with corpora which had more than 50 authors the corpora from englishcorpro.org from the backbone of the 49 chapters this was much more than any other set of corpora in fact six times as much as any other corpora there are 17 corpora at
• 01:30 - 02:00 englishcorpora.org by far the most widely used of these corpora and thus the most widely used online Corpus anywhere is Coca the Corpus of Contemporary American English coca is composed of more than one billion words of data in genres ranging from very informal for example spoken and also TV and movie scripts to formal
• 02:00 - 02:30 such as academic each of the eight genres has between 120 and 130 million words of data there are many many ways in which these corpora and especially coca can be used for language learning and teaching in this video we'll focus on just 10 of these and again so that we don't need to
• 02:30 - 03:00 mention it every time almost all of these features are only found in the corpora from englishcorper.org they're not found anywhere else a big part of sounding native like in a foreign language is knowing whether a word or phrase or grammatical construction sounds formal or informal and you can easily see this with Coca
• 03:00 - 03:30 for example the word seldom is used much more in formal genres than in informal genres and you can easily compare two ways of saying something for example lots of noun is used much more in informal English like TV and movie
• 03:30 - 04:00 subtitles and spoken whereas several noun is used more in formal genres like academic one of the hardest things for a non-native speaker is having a good sense of which words sound the best together for example suppose that you're writing a paper and you want to use just
• 04:00 - 04:30 the right word related to the concept of powerful or potent with the word argument a simple search equals potent argument can show you the results and you can even see the results by genre this would let you know that the most common phrases would be strong argument convincing argument powerful argument or
• 04:30 - 05:00 persuasive argument and of course from any results page you can click on the word or phrase to see it in context and you can even get more context if you want up to about 200 words of context collicates are nearby words and they
• 05:00 - 05:30 often provide great insight into meaning and usage which goes Way Beyond what you'd see in the dictionary for example the following is the definition of sprawl from dictionary.com and it's probably not too helpful a Google image search paints a nice picture of what sprawl is and in the Corpus you can see that
• 05:30 - 06:00 collicates or nearby words of sprawl include pollution congestion rampant ugly and reduce and fight all of which suggest that sprawl is viewed pretty negatively you can also find topics which are words that co-occur anywhere in the text
• 06:00 - 06:30 for example these are the collocates of dinosaur and these are the topics you can also compare colicates to tease out differences between words for example these are the collocates of utter and complete note that the collocates of utter on the
• 06:30 - 07:00 left are much more negative and these are the collocates of dirt and soil words don't occur in isolation they occur as part of a pattern of words and phrases and concordance lines allow us to examine these patterns
• 07:00 - 07:30 for example these are the concordance lines of the verb fathom notice that the word is almost always preceded by a negative word that's why it sounds fine to say I can't possibly fathom what they might have been thinking but it would sound very strange to say yeah dude I totally fathom what you're saying
• 07:30 - 08:00 for each of the top 60 000 words in the Corpus which is pretty much every word you'll encounter you can see an incredibly wide range of information including definitions images videos translations synonyms colleges topics word clusters
• 08:00 - 08:30 and concordance lines and you can click on pretty much any word to take you to a detailed page with information on that related word you can also save words to a favorites list and then categorize these words such as words related to biology or cars or a particular class of verbs
• 08:30 - 09:00 you can also browse through the top sixty thousand words in the corpus this is like a dictionary on steroids and it's great for language Learners and teachers you can search for words by word form part of speech frequency range synonyms and even pronunciation and even
• 09:00 - 09:30 definition for example suppose you want to compare synonyms of harsh you can browse through the top sixty thousand words in English and see the synonyms sorted by frequency this way you can see that you might want to avoid a word that is hardly ever used and which might seem strange to native
• 09:30 - 10:00 speakers or you can search for words that have sugar in the definition or both computer and device many language Learners and teachers are
• 10:00 - 10:30 especially interested in academic English the academic vocabulary list or AVL is perhaps the best list of academic English words you can browse the entire list and then see detailed information on any word in the list
• 10:30 - 11:00 you can also see the words grouped by word family with lots of information that you would never see in other lists like the academic word list you can input entire texts such as articles that you find in web-based newspapers and magazines
• 11:00 - 11:30 you can see keywords from the text and you can click on any keyword or any word in the text to see detailed information as discussed above
• 11:30 - 12:00 you can also find other phrases that are related to any phrase in the text
• 12:00 - 12:30 by default when you click on a word or phrase it will show you the concordance lines but from this page and pretty much all of the other results Pages you can click on other links links that will take you to a wide range of external resources
• 12:30 - 13:00 including web search image search videos Google Books and translations
• 13:00 - 13:30 you can also use links to external resources from the keyword in context page such as hearing the line pronounced is the odd one out on this list but some of us have a soft spot for teen movies and this one is pretty delicious or seeing a translation
• 13:30 - 14:00 or getting information on any other word in the line
• 14:00 - 14:30 one of the problems that Learners sometimes have had with corporate in the past is that they're overwhelmed by all of the other words that they don't recognize on the key wording context page but with all of the helpful tools that englishcorporate.org that should no longer be much of a problem it can be overwhelming to try to learn a
• 14:30 - 15:00 foreign language and especially to get native-like insight into word meaning and usage knowing which words go together or finding just the right word for a particular concept one way to acquire this knowledge is through thousands and thousands of hours interacting with the language but Corpus data can also give us some of this information with just a click or two and
• 15:00 - 15:30 just two or three seconds as we've seen there are many many tools at englishcorpora.org that provide teachers and Learners with amazing insights into English and as has been mentioned the vast majority of the tools that we've discussed here are not available anywhere else they are only available from corpora like coca and the other corpora from
• 15:30 - 16:00 englishcorpora.org which are the most widely used corpora for teaching and learning