[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 10 | June 20, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Maggie Charles says, ”
Do you spend hours looking for appropriate EAP examples?
Do you sometimes struggle to answer when your students ask, ‘Can I say…?’ or ‘Is there another word for…?’.
As EAP teachers, we encounter such problems on a daily basis and this where a corpus can help. But where can you find a suitable corpus of academic texts?
The British National Corpus (BNC), available here, covers both spoken and written language and has an academic component. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is similar in content.
These corpora are very large: the BNC contains 100 million words in total (16 million academic), while COCA holds 450 million words (81 million academic). Another freely available resource is The British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE), which contains over 6 million words of high quality student writing. The examples I’ve used here come from The Compleat Lexical Tutor, which provides several smaller academic corpora. For teachers and students of EAP these corpora provide a huge store of examples of academic English as it is actually used”.