Corpus News

[5jj]

I have just received the following message from http://corpus.byu.edu , which may be of interest to teachers who haven't tried this useful site yet:


1. If you teach English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), we have a new resource that might be of interest to you. At CORPORA: 45-425 million words each: free online access you can share links to some of your corpus-based projects for language learners. And within a month or two, there will hopefully be enough projects listed there that you can use this as a resource to get some great corpus-based projects and activities from others as well. To help get this started, we've added to the database a very nice, in-depth MA project that was recently completed on using COCA: Teaching Vocabulary Through Data-driven Learning, by Erin Shaw (feedback).

2. By the way, if you are interested in using corpora for Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages, let us know by indicating this via the “TESOL” question in your profile. If we get “critical mass”, we may consider creating additional resources, beyond the “Projects” database.

[...]

5. Finally, just to remind you about some other recent updates:

• COCA has been updated include texts from 2011, and it now contains 425 million words (it's the only large, publicly available corpus that continues to be updated)
• The final version of COHA (400 million words, 1810s-2000s) is now online
• The BYU Google Books corpus is now available (155 billion words, including 62 billion words from the 1980s-2000s)
• Re-sortable concordancing views are now available for all corpora
• A free 500,000 wordlist is now available from the COCA-based Word Frequency site