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.

I start off by asking them one of the questions above realting it to word we're discussing, for example: "How do you use the word ubiquitous?" Obviously, they don't know, so I ask them how they could find out. Google is first on the answer list, but I push them further. Google may tell you the meaning, but not really how to use this word. This is where I propose the corpus, explain to them what it is and show them the website at www.americancorpus.org.

I tend to ask them to give me a random word to look up. I type this into the search box and we discover how many times it is in the corpus. Then, you click on the word again in the right-hand box to get the context. I show them that it provides much more information on actual use; for example, whether it's spoken or written and the sentence it is in. As a follow-up I give them a short assignment to look up some words in the corpus. This will involve looking up words they know and don't know and asking them some related questions that require them to look at the contextual use. I may ask them things like naming 10-15 adjectives that come with the noun, guessing meaning from the context, assessing whether this word is more spoken or written, etc.

Obviously, the corpus has many more search options that will be useful for a true academic, but the basic search function is enough for students who need to use it for their learning. And if a question arises in class that the corpus can answer, I use it in front of them to show them how independent learning can easily happen if you know your way around the internet more than just Google and Wikipedia.