Four Favourite Corpora

Recently, I gave a 10-minute talk at the ELT Freelancers’ Awayday in Oxford about “Simple corpus hacks for ELT editors”. I only had time to look at one corpus and a handful of searches, but I promised to share some of my other favourites in a blog post. So here goes…

1 Monco: In my talk, I looked at the Monco corpus. I chose it because it’s a monitor corpus, so it monitors current usage, updating with new data daily and as such, I find it useful for answering language questions that haven’t yet made it into conventional reference sources like dictionaries. For example, in my talk, we looked at how wellbeing (spelled as a single word) may be catching up with more traditional hyphenated form (well-being) that you’ll find in most dictionaries (simply by typing well-being|wellbeing into the search box). The split was 35% – 65% in Monco compared with 17% – 83% in the British National Corpus (with data from the 1980s and 90s). We also turned up some potentially useful verb collocates for newsfeed, including scroll through and pop up, which won’t have yet made it into a collocations dictionary. One of my favourite features of Monco, especially for the corpus novice, is its user-friendly search screen and its nice graphics for results.

On the downside, Monco’s data is drawn from entirely online news sources which means that it’s really only reflective of journalism, rather than language usage in general. And although it includes sources from the UK, US, Canada and Australia, it isn’t balanced, so there’s significantly more data from some sources than others – a factor to bear in mind that can skew the results.

2 Brigham Young University: Not strictly a single corpus, but a collection of different corpora available via the same site and the go-to source for lots of queries. Personally, I tend to use COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) for checking US usage. It’s a large corpus containing a nice variety of contemporary sources (1990 – present), including radio & TV transcripts, fiction, newspapers, magazines and academic data. Through BYU, you can also find host a specialized corpora including a corpus of Wikipedia entries and even, slightly weirdly, the Hansard corpus of British parliamentary proceedings, should that happen to fit your purpose!

My main grumble with BYU is that I find the interface clunky and frustrating to use, especially with its rather distracting colour-coding.

3 BAWE and BASE: The British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE) and the British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE) are composed of written and spoken data collected from university students at a number of British universities. The written corpus contains essays and other coursework which received a good pass mark and the spoken data includes lectures and seminars. I particular like these corpora because they’re an example of language as it might be used by the peers of the students we’re aiming at, rather than text produced by professional writers, journalists, academics, etc. which doesn’t necessarily provide an appropriate model for the average ELT student. This is obviously university-level language, so is especially relevant for EAP, but I think BAWE could be useful for any advanced students who need to write formal essays (IELTS, CAE, Proficiency). And if you’re looking for US academic equivalents, you could also check out MICUSP and MICASE.

BAWE and BASE are actually available via several sources, but I wanted the excuse to get you to experience Sketch Engine, for me, the gold standard when it comes to corpus tools and the interface used by all the major dictionary publishers for their large corpora.

4 Spoken BNC2014: I admit this is the corpus on my list that I’ve probably used least so far, but I’m including it because it’s one I’m quite excited about finding uses for. Slightly contrary to its name, it was only released in 2017 and is the result of a massive project to collect data about current spoken English used in everyday contexts. If you’re working on speaking materials, looking at evidence from written English is not going to tell you anything terribly useful, because we just don’t speak how we write. So I think this could become the go-to corpus for anyone who wants to know how people actually say things.

Unfortunately, the Spoken BNC2014 doesn’t have the most user-friendly interface and getting access involves a bit of a faffy sign-up process which could be off-putting for the casual user. If spoken language is your thing though, I think it’s worth investing the time and effort to check it out, not least because some of the content is just really funny!

A note about corpora and copyright: It’s important to remember that, in general, the data that appears in a corpus is liable to all the usual copyright restrictions. That means you can’t just pull a big chunk of language from the corpus and use it in your activity, especially not if it’s for commercial publication. Occasionally, of course, you come across very short, ‘vanilla’ examples which could have come from almost anywhere (A young woman opened the door. The traffic was particularly bad.), but to be honest, these are few and far between. Generally, when I search for a particular language item, I’ll scan through the examples and jot down a ‘frame’:

I/you scroll through my/your (Facebook) newsfeed to see/searching for/on the train …

Then I’ll use my notes as the basis for an example that keeps the feel and pattern of the ones I’ve looked at, but fits my teaching purpose … and doesn’t infringe copyright.

There are lots of different corpora out there and corpus fans will have their personal favourites. If you’re new to corpora though, I’d say pick one or two to check out, play around with a few simple searches, use the help to get you started, and see what’s most useful for you. Be warned though, it can be addictive!

EAP & Corpora: A fabulously nerdy day out

After a busy few weeks at my desk and two EAP weekends in a row, I’ve got a bit of a blog backlog,  so let me go back a bit first …

A couple of weekends ago, I went to a BALEAP event at Coventry University about EAP and corpora. I hesitated a bit about going, as I wasn’t speaking, I didn’t have any publisher funding, so it meant shelling out for the fee and the train fare from my own pocket. It just seemed too much up my street to miss though and in the end, it proved well worth it. It was a great day, with lots of interesting sessions and plenty of opportunities to chat to people between times. I came away feeling that my brain had been properly stretched and that I’d really learned some new stuff. 

These are just a few of my highlights …

Philip Durrant from Exeter University jumped right in with some fantastically-nerdy academic details in his opening plenary, looking at how we divide up academic disciplines and presenting results of his research into how disciplines map out if we look at them in terms of similarities (and differences) in vocabulary use (based on student writing in the BAWE corpus). He came up with some great “maps” showing how disciplines form into clusters with “hard subjects” (sciences; physics, chemistry, engineering) displaying similarities on one side, “soft subjects” (arts and humanities; English, history, philosophy) together on the other side, then various subjects, perhaps as you’d expect (social sciences; business, health) somewhere in the middle sharing aspects of both. This may feel fairly obvious, but it was the small details which came out that caught my attention. For example, when he broke down disciplines further into academic level, some displayed fairly similar vocabulary use at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and others showed quite a shift. Engineering, for instance was firmly in the hard science area of the map at undergraduate level, then moved into the centre ground alongside business at postgraduate level (reflecting a shift to a more applied approach). Although I spent a lot of the session coming up with questions and holes to pick in the research, I take that as a sign that I was really caught up in what he was saying! And I loved the visuals :) [A reference to his latest paper is here, but unfortunately, it’s a journal you need a subscription for, which I haven't got :( ]

I went to a really interesting session by Bella Reichard about using concordancers (corpus software) with students in an EAP context. One of the issues to come out of the session, and which continued a bit on Twitter afterwards, was the amount of time teachers have to invest in becoming familiar with concordancing software themselves so that they feel confident enough to use it in class. It got me thinking that perhaps we need to focus first on the benefits to teachers of using concordancers as a resource for themselves rather than jumping ahead to using them with students. Definitely a subject for a blog post … watch this space.

My final highlight was Hilary Nesi’s hands-on corpus session. Her focus, investigating the use of citation by students in different disciplines (using the BAWE corpus) was very interesting, but the best bit was just playing around with corpus searches, trying to find the best way to get what I wanted, alongside the likes of Hilary Nesi and Diane Schmitt. As a lowly, commercial corpus ‘hack’, it was quite nice to feel just as proficient as the academic corpus luminaries. Sometimes part of me would really like to do the PhD I contemplated a few years ago, to spend time playing around with corpora without the restrictive briefs or time pressures of the commercial world … but then, I know I just wouldn’t have the patience to do all that situating my research within the academic whatsisname! Still, it was fun to dip a toe in the academic water for a while…

Corpus pick-me-up

This week, I've mostly been working on EAP materials and whilst I'm really enjoying getting my teeth into some writing, by lunchtime today, I was starting to flag and I realised that progress was slowing down.  I'd been looking at using journal article abstracts and was mulling over some language work on expressing the aims of a piece of writing and wondering about the use of This paper will explore/discuss/focus on, etc. as opposed to personal pronouns; I/We will examine/discuss... It's tempting to encourage students not to use personal pronouns in their academic writing - largely because you're trying to steer them away from the rather IELTS-y I think, I believe, In my opinion type phrasing. But then, I know that some academic texts, especially in certain disciplines, do commonly use personal pronouns, especially in stating aims.

Having been reminded of a couple of useful corpus resources over the weekend, I decided to put my intuitions to the test. I used several different sources to see how different types of writers express the aims of a piece of writing. As well as looking at conventional academic corpora of 'professional' academic writers (in the form of published journal articles, etc), I used the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE) and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) to investigate how students express their aims (largely in essay introductions rather than abstracts). As I built up some lovely lists of common phrases in my notebook, I felt my energy levels rising, even on a wet Friday afternoon! I'm not sure what it is about all those lines of words on the screen slowly revealing themselves into patterns, but it certainly perked me up.

 My notebook satisfyingly full of words, phrases and patterns - click to enlarge.

It also revealed that indeed both patterns are common, as is the combination of the two (In this paper, we will ...) and they both appear in both published academic texts and student writing.  Yes, the different forms were clearly used with varying frequencies and in slightly different proportions in different text types, but for my purposes, the exact statistics didn't really matter - I'm being corpus-informed, not corpus-driven here.  What was important was that all the different forms were worth highlighting. Sadly, I can't cram everything I discovered into the very short task I'm working on, but I'll keep it for future reference, and a couple of hours playing with words certainly lifted me out of my slump and sparked a few ideas.