Please note that the number of resources listed on this page has dwindled dramatically since I took over the corpora site from David Lee & many of those still listed now unfortunately appear to be rather outdated.
Corpus-based Language Teaching, CALL, Vocab Research, etc.
Also see the References/Journals section
On-line Resources for Classroom Concordancing, Text Profiling, etc.
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Compleat Lexical Tutor (by Tom Cobb) | Web-based suite of tools for data-driving self-learning (mainly for vocabulary); past any text of interest and get a self-teaching text linked to speech, dictionary, concordance, and self-test resources. Tools include a concordancer, a phrase (n-gram) extractor, VocabProfile (tells you how many words in the text come from the following four frequency levels: (1) the list of the most frequent 1000 word families, (2) the second 1000, (3) the Academic Word List, and (4) words that do not appear on the other lists), a vocab-level-based cloze passage generator and a traditional nth-word cloze builder. |
| AntWordProfiler | Freeware word profiling program (for Windows and Macintosh OS X); works like Paul Nation’s Range program. |
Phraseological/Vocabulary-related Tools and Bibliographies
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| JustTheWord | The most accessible site for students (and most pedagogically useful) because it straightaway gives you a list of collocations for your search word/phrase, instead of concordances; results are categorized by POS-based patterns and by approximate sense clusters, and graph bars give an indication of how common each combination is. Results are based on a 80K-word subset of the BNC. |
| Phrases in English (PIE) | Web site that incorporates a database of all 1-6-grams (phrases 1 to 6 "words" long) with part-of-speech (POS) codes occurring three or more times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC). You can explore English phraseology either through lists of forms and their frequencies or by searching for specific forms or collocations, e.g. 2-grams of the pattern "ADJ work", to find the most frequent adjectives describing work. PIE also offers a phrase pattern discovery tool, "phrase-frames": sets of variants of an n-gram identical except for one word (wildcard symbol *), e.g., "the * of the", with variants such "the end of the", "the rest of the", "the top of the", "the nature of the". Over the next year PIE will add: (i) Click on an n-gram in the query results to see concordances from the BNC (ii) POS-grams and POS-frames for studying the relative productivity of phrase structures (iii) Filtering by text type (domain, genre, target audience) for contrastive studies (iv) Query by regular expression (currently only wildcards are supported). |
| Vocabulary Acquisition Research Group Archive (VARGA) | Headed by Paul Meara and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus at Swansea; includes a bibliographical database covering work in the area of vocabulary acquisition in a second language |
| Second Language Vocabulary Resources page | Rob Waring’s pages. Includes a bibliography of second language acquisition and learning (overlaps with the VARGA database above, but covers a bit more). |
Notes, FAQs, teaching materials and other CBL resources
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| ICT4LT (Information & Communications Technology for Language Teachers) | A useful collection of materials (basic, intermediate & advanced) for training UK language teachers in information technology and CALL. Last updated 5 May 2012 & now appears somewhat outdated. |
| Tim Johns' Kibbitzer Pages | By one of the key pioneers of classroom concordancing. Kibbitzer = short discussion of a language point (lexico-grammatical and discoursal). |
CALL-related
Computer-Assisted Language Learning; not necessarily related to corpora
| Resource | Description | Claire Bradin Siskin’s General Links for CALL | collection of links for CALL |
|---|---|
| John and Muriel Higgins’s Page | CALL & Linguistics Links |
Dictionaries & Glossaries (on-line)
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| OneLook Dictionary Search | Searches a whole lot of on-line dictionaries in one go, and lets you decide which dictionary’s definition you want to look at. |
| Collins Online Dictionary |
Mutilingual dictionary. |
| Chinese-English Dictionary on-line | Input text in English or Mandarin Chinese (Pinyin, Big5, GB encodings) and get definitions in the other language. Has pronunciation sound files for the Mandarin words. |
| Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online | Claims to be the biggest and most up-to-date ESL dictionary in the world, with entries for ecotourism, keep it real, scrunchie, woolly liberal, redux (American English) and the British slang meaning of pants. |
| Merriam-Webster On-line Dictionary | Includes the unabridged version and a thesaurus. American English; has audio links. |
| Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) | 80,000 references, British & American English. |
| Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary | Another one for learners; unlike their rival dictionary (OALD), this one seems to include only contemporary pronunciations of words (e.g. entries for poor and zoology) |
| Freedictionary.org | As the name says, a free online dictionary. Definitions taken from the Open English WordNet 2025. |
| TheFreeDictionary.com | English, Medical, Legal, and Computer Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one. |
| YourDictionary.com | Has dictionaries, glossaries and more for several languages. |
| Wordsmyth | Yet another dictionary and thesaurus site; includes a children’s dictionary. |
Miscellaneous Language Teaching/ESL/EFL/EAP Meta-sites and Links
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Using English for Academic Purposes (UEfAP) | An online guide for international students |
| ESL Cafe (Dave Sperling) | Various resources for ESL/EFL students and teachers |
| iLoveLanguages | A comprehensive(?) catalogue of language-related Internet resources |
Miscellany
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| FrameNet lexical database | A lexicon-building effort in which researchers (1) study words; (2) describe the frames or conceptual structures which underlie these; (3) examine sentences, using a very large corpus of contemporary English that contains these words; and (4) record the ways in which information from the associated frames are expressed in these sentences. |
| Text Analysis Info page | Qualitative and quantitative commerical text analysis software, esp. for "content analysis" |
Other Useful Bookmark Sites
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
|
Manuel Barbera’s Corpora and Corpus-based Computational Linguistics links pages |
Huge collection of links. Particularly good for links to non-English corpora (both well-known and lesser-known languages). |
| Mike Barlow’s Corpus Linguistics links page | Probably the first bookmarks site for CBL; good esp. for non-English corpora, but has lots of dead links & parts appear rather out-dated. | Texto! | Web site (in French) devoted to corpus-based linguistics. |