This document discusses corpus linguistics and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It defines a corpus as a collection of natural texts and corpus linguistics as the analysis of language based on computerized text collections. COCA can be used to learn English by solving doubts and for teaching by creating classroom activities. The document demonstrates how to use COCA's search features like lists, charts, and key word in context and provides examples of classroom activities using COCA to find frequent words by genre and examples of phrasal verbs in context.

1. Gabriela da Costa Rosa
Ha Na Choi
Ye Jin Choi

2. What is a corpus?
“A corpus can be defined as a systematic collection of
naturally occurring texts (of both written and spoken
language)”. Nesselhauf, 2005

3. What is corpus linguistics?
“Corpus linguistics thus is the analysis of naturally
occurring language on the basis of computerized
corpora. Usually, the analysis is performed with the
help of the computer, i.e. with specialized software,
and takes into account the frequency of the
phenomena investigated”. Nesselhauf, 2005

4. Advantages
 Language in its natural use - frequency and context.
Disadvantages
 The data collected is not explained
Interactive work

5. Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA)
 What can we use it for?
Learning English - solve doubts
Teaching English - prepare and apply class activities

6. How to use COCA
Displays:
 LIST: Shows a list of word(s) or combination of words
(according to their frequency)
 CHART: Shows a chart comparing frequencies of a
word in different genre or time.
 KWIC: Shows the key word(s), i.e. search word(s), in
contexts
 COMPARE: Compares two words according to their
frequencies (just generally or with a certain
collocate)

7. How to use COCA
 COLLOCATES: a word (not a phrase) that occurs
within up to 10 words before / after the search word(s)
You can choose the collocation range by clicking two
little boxes next to theCOLLOCATE box
 POS LIST: List of “parts of speech” - to look for a part
of speech (a noun, a verb etc.) that occurs after a word

8. Other devices:
 [word] – forms of a word
 [=word] –synonyms
 word.[n*] – specific class
 word * - what comes after the word
 word* - what come in the end of the word
How to use COCA

9. Practical use of COCA
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

10. Suggestion of activities

11. Activity 1
Search for the most frequent word in a genre
Look at the example sentence below. Answer questions a) - c).
Then, circle the word that you should use in your paper.
I am fully / totally aware of the problem.
In which genre is “totally” most frequently used?
In which genre is “fully” most frequently used?
So, which word would you use in your paper?

12. Activity 2
Examples of sentences with phrasal verbs
 Find examples in COCA of the following phrasal verbs:
 Come across
 Figure out
 Look after
 Work out

13. Activity 3
Inferring the meaning of words in the context
Sensitive
X
Sensible

14. Tutorials on Youtube
 Introduction to COCA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCLgRTlxG0Y
 Using Part-of-Speech Tags
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-7thiUnLM
 Collocations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SxpfiPo_o