A language corpus for students

The current generation of college students grew up with computers and internet, and most of them now own smartphones or iPads. You don't really need to tell them anything about how to find information because Google and Wikipedia are their best friends. (Vetting the information for use is another issue, but that's for a later post.) Sometimes though, language questions cannot be answered with a Google search or by glancing at a Wikipedia article: How is this word or phrase used? How common is this word or phrase? Which of two/three words or phrases is more common in this situation? For these and other questions, one needs to use a language corpus and my favorite is the COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English which is a collection of spoken and written material from 1990 till now with over 425 million words. It's generally used for academic purposes, but I like to introduce it to my students and show the power of this tool for them as English learners.