VOA · Education Tips
Advanced · C1learner speed8:292023-07-20public domain
Education Tips shares practical advice for students: study habits, test preparation, applying to schools. The vocabulary is academic but the delivery is slow and structured, making it useful preparation for exam listening sections.
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01A language corpus is a huge collection of texts taken from print, video, audio, and other sources.
02It is a powerful tool that can help you learn more about English words and phrases.
03In today's article, we look at the most widely used corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA.
04COCA contains more than one billion words from 1990 to 2019, and it has many ways to help learners find out more about how words are used.
05Take the adjective profound as an example.
06In a dictionary, you will find that one meaning of profound is the adjective deep.
07So, you might think English speakers will say that a body of water is profound.
08But English speakers never say that.
09A corpus like COCA shows that the most common words that follow profound are effect or ability.
10And the most common words that follow the adjective deep are breath or water.
11For example, we will say, COCA makes it easy to read and hear examples of how to use vocabulary correctly.
12First, you will need to register with COCA to use the collection.
13You can register for two kinds of accounts.
14A free account limits you to 20 searches for words within any 24-hour period.
15A paid account will give you 200 searches within any 24-hour period.
16Here are the steps for using COCA to find examples of how a word is used.
17We will use the word profound to show this.
18On the home page, type the word profound in the white search box on the left side of the screen.
19Click Find matching strings just below the search box.
20This will take you to a new web page.
21On this new page, you will see the word profound in blue.
22Click on it.
23You will now see a page with 100 examples using the word profound, and the word profound is shown in green.
24The source of each example is shown on the left side.
25If you click on the source on the left, COCA will show you a larger part of the text containing the example.
26If you want to see more examples, click the two forward page arrows at the top or bottom left.
27This brings you to the next 100 examples.
28In this way, you might find more kinds of sources for the examples.
29COCA also has a tool that lets you see many useful things about a word on one page.
30We will show this with the word deep.
31On the COCA homepage, click on Word in blue, just above the white search box.
32Type the word deep in the search box.
33Click on the See detailed info for the word, just below the search box.
34Now you will see a page with definitions, audio pronunciation, links to translations, synonyms, links to videos with the word, and more.
35This page is called the word homepage.
36Scroll down the page.
37You will see another long list of example sentences with words in many colors.
38The adjective deep is in green, and the nouns that follow it are in blue.
39You will see that in these examples, the noun breath occurs the most after the adjective deep.
40You may wonder, how can we know for sure that the most common words that follow deep are breath or water?
41Scroll back to the top of the word homepage for deep.
42On the right, you will see the word collocates in blue.
43A collocation is a word or phrase that is often used with another word or phrase.
44Clicking on collocates will show you lists of words that follow deep.
45And you will see that breath and water are the first two words on the list.
46Knowing what words sound the best together can be hard for people learning English.
47A corpus can be helpful because it shows you ways that words are used together.
48See if you can learn to use coca by searching for the adjectives utter and diverse.
49Utter is both a verb and an adjective, so you must tell coca to only search for adjectives.
50Here is how to do that.
51Just to the right of the white search box, click on the POS letters in gray.
52Next, click on POS again and then select ADJ all.
53This makes coca search only for adjectives.
54In the search box, delete the letters ADJ and type the word you want to search.
55Now follow the steps shown above for profound and deep, but this time use the words utter and diverse.
56If you find on the word homepage for utter that coca has searched for the verb form, you can change it to adjective.
57To do this, click on ADJ in blue just below the word utter on the top left area of the page.
58When you perform a search, what do you notice about the nouns that follow utter?
59About the nouns that follow diverse?
60Write to us and let us know what you found.
61Learning how to use a corpus can take some time.
62Coca has a guide showing you the many ways to use it.
63You can also find tutorials on YouTube.
64Just remember that a corpus is a tool that can help you deepen your understanding of vocabulary and the ways to use it.
65And in another Education Tips, we will explain more about the importance of collocations and how a corpus can help you learn them.
66I'm Andrew Smith.
67And I'm Jill Robbins.
68I'm Jill Robbins.
69I'm Jill Robbins.
70I'm Jill Robbins.
71I'm Jill Robbins.
72I'm Jill Robbins.
73I'm Jill Robbins.
74I'm Jill Robbins.
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