Resources

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Courtesy of Norebbo

These resources and tools are available for free. They are broken into four sections and listed alphabetically. If you have any questions, or would like to suggest another resource to add to this page, please let me know in the comments.


Corpora, concordancers, engines, and analysis resources

AntConc – AntConc and several other tools, such as AntWordProfiler and TagAnt, are freeware for exploring and analyzing corpora. Quite a lot can be done with these tools.

BACKBONE – A multilingual, pedagogic, spoken corpus with video. There is a separate search tool, too.

BYU Corpora – A collection of several large corpora, and a browser-based interface. Home to the well-known Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). After 10-15 queries, registration (free) is required. You can also create your own ‘virtual’ corpora.

ICNALE – International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English. A learner corpus with text and audio from learners from several Asian countries, as well as some texts from native English speakers for comparison.

Intellitext – A neat interface with a lot of functions. Several corpora, in a variety of languages, to choose from. You can also upload your own.

LancsBox – A great corpus analysis tool that has a neat visualizer called GraphColl that is useful for looking at collocations and ‘collocation networks’.

Lextutor – The classic. Several corpora, several tools, several activities. The website isn’t the most artfully designed, but there is certainly a lot of good stuff available like cloze activities, a vocabulary profiler, and a graded reader corpus.

MiCASE – The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Very useful, easily searchable.

MOECS – The Corpus of Multilingual Opinion Essays by College Students. Contains student essays written in L1 (English, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese) and L2 (English, Japanese) varieties by students with a variety of national and linguistic backgrounds.

NoSketch Engine – An open-source version of the commercial Sketch Engine.

SCoRE – The Sentence Corpus of Remedial English. Specially designed sentence corpus and grammar pattern browser tool for low-proficiency learners (particularly in Japan) to learn grammar through access to concordance lines. The Japanese page is a bilingual parallel corpus, while the English page is monolingual. (Here is an unofficial user guide; SCoRE now has an official user guide in English, and has always had one in Japanese, on its website). Highly recommend, especially for Japanese learners of English. One could also ‘reverse engineer’ it to study Japanese through DDL.

SkELL – Sketch Engine for Language Learning. Easy-to-search and provides easy-to-read concordances and has a nice word sketch feature. Highly recommended.

Skylight – A browser-based concordancer with a relatively simple query syntax and format. Should be good for preparing concordance materials for the classroom, and maybe even for direct use by learners.

TECCLTen-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners corpus. A learner corpus available in raw and PoS-tagged formats.

TED Corpus Search Engine – Searchable corpus of TED talks. Links to TED videos showing the speakers actually using the queried items.

WebParaNews – Parallel corpus of Japanese and English newspaper texts.


Corpus-informed, corpus-exploiting, and corpus-derived resources

English Profile – Available for free (for now) with registration, it works like a souped-up, expanded learner’s dictionary. Entries are coded to CEFR levels (different senses of a word may be coded at different CEFR levels, so may have different entries). Lots of possible uses. Highly recommended.

FLAX – Corpus-derived Open Educational Resources like games and apps.

Just the Word – An easy-to-use collocation tool. Type in a word and get the most frequent collocations. An especially nice touch is that the collocations can be ‘clustered’ according to what kind of collocates a word has, which can help in understanding different senses of a word.

Linggle – Similar functions to Just the Word, but uses a different corpus.

Netspeak – Input a word or phrase, and Netspeak will suggest the most statistically likely collocates/combinations.

New General Service List – The most frequent (and thus important?) words for English learners to know. There is also an academic word list. Several resources and activities utilizing the list are available.

Word and Phrase – An excellent, powerful tool that can analyze text and compare it to data from COCA. Very useful!

WriteAway – Another writing tool that will offer suggestions for completing phrases/chunks.


Dictionaries

Cambridge Dictionaries Online – Example sentences and each sense of a word is coded to a CEFR level. Multilingual. Here is their learner’s dictionary.

Linguee – Crawls the web to provide real-world translated material (a lot of translations from corporate websites and such) alongside bilingual entries. Multilingual search (lots of languages!).

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English – Another good learner’s dictionary.

Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary – Another good learner’s dictionary.

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries – Clean interface. Lots and lots of example sentences in the entries.

PHaVE Dictionary – Covers the 150 most frequent phrasal verbs; includes various senses for several of them. Easy-to-use interface. Quite informative, imo.


DIY corpus builders

AntCorGen – A tool to compile a corpus from PLoS ONE articles.

ICEweb – Do-it-yourself corpus building tool.

TextSTAT – Do-it-yourself corpus building tool.

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