Corpus Resources for Language Teaching

This page lists different resources available online to create corpus-based or corpus-informed teaching materials for the EFL/ESL classroom. The first part 'Corpus Tools for Language Learners' is a list of Data-Driven Learning Tools ready to be used in the EFL/ESL Classroom. The second set of links 'Corpus-Based or Corpus-Informed Activities' is a list of online ready-made corpus activities or lesson plans. 

Corpus Tools for Language Learners


You can use it to create word clouds, check the vocabulary density of a text, or look at concordance lines for words in your text.

This one gives you the connections between words. You can also use it to create wordlists from texts.

WebCorp is a tool that allows you to access the World Wide Web as a corpus. You can create wordlists from a given URL – great for vocab teaching, or search for concordance lines for a given word or string.

This tool allows you to search for patterns or collocates of a given word or string. You can do a simple search or a use the more advanced filters to filter by frequency, number of n-grams, etc.

A super simple interface that will create a gap-fill exercise using the AWL. All you need to do is paste a text and click submit.

A search engine that explores TED transcripts. You can use to create vocabulary exercises before watching a specific TEDTalk, or even to compare the use of a word in academic texts vs academic lectures.

Infinite possibilities with this one, you can search parallel corpora, create wordlists, search for collocates, n-grams, etc.

Free TxT was developed to help create visualization tools for surveys, but you can import any spreadsheet with the tools available on this website.

This is a simplified language data analysis tool. It incorporates different features of corpus analysis.

Did we miss a corpus tool that you use for teaching?
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Corpus-Based or Corpus-Informed Activities

This is a project from Lancaster University that brings together corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, teachers and material writers to develop teaching materials and online platforms that incorporate corpus-based findings as well as direct access to corpora to teach about how English is used in real life situations. The materials were developed both for A-level English Language classes as well as for teaching English as a foreign/second language classes.

Using Language Data to Learn About Language: A Teachers' Guide to Classroom Corpus Use

https://uq.pressbooks.pub/using-language-data/

This books has English, Portuguese and Spanish tasks using Corpus resources. The book contains both hands-on and hands-off tasks, so that teachers from different contexts can use it.

Creating Corpus-Informed Materials for the English as a Foreign Language Classroom

https://pressbooks.pub/elenlefoll/

This book is a bank of ideas and resources to inspire teachers to use corpus tools in the language classroom.

Corpora in English Language Teaching: Classroom Activities for Teachers New to Corpus Linguistics

https://pressbooks.pub/testbook123/

This book is a bank of ideas and resources created by pre-service teachers.

CROW Resources and Activities for Teachers

https://writecrow.org/crow-for-teachers/pedagogical-materials/

A database of corpus-based activities created by the CROW team.

This site is designed as an aid for teachers who’d like to introduce students to concordances (see example below) that can help raise their awareness of how English works.

Kibbitzers

https://lexically.net/TimJohns/

These are ideas Tim created for language teaching, usually based on problems he had met in his work in English for Academic Purposes at Birmingham University.

CORAL lab presentations

PennTESOL East
Dr. Goulart Plenary Presentation

ALP 10th Winter Conference
Dr. Goulart Keynote Presentation