How can you apply corpus-based studies to improve academic writing?

Corpus-based studies offer a valuable approach to enhancing academic writing by providing a data-driven foundation. By analyzing language patterns and usage in authentic texts, you can enhance: 1. Vocabulary 2. Grammar and Syntax 3. Style and Cohesion: 4. Argumentation: Incorporating corpus-based insights into your writing process can lead to more polished, effective, and academically sound compositions.

A corpus is a large collection of machine-readable written and/or spoken texts. The definition of "large" varies from source to source and depends on your research question, but usually research corpora amount to more than tens of thousands of words. It should be noted that corpora of spoken language can consist either of speech transcriptions or embedded audio files, or both, so, the definition of 'text' is also rather broad. Recently, multimodal corpora containing images and videos have been compiled; their analysis techniques are still being developed, and the possibilities of using AI tools for this purpose are tested.

Corpus-based analysis has assisted me to identify my students' texts weaknesses, plan my scheme of work around that and inform decisions pertaining to my teaching and assessment methods. Moreover, being educated about corpus-based studies and their findings can help decision makers in formation of educational policies and the choice of language pedagogical procedures to enhance and improve target population's academic writing.

A corpus, as a set of linguistic data belonging to the oral or written use of a language (or both), is systematically organized according to certain criteria. It should be sufficiently extensive in breadth and depth to be representative of the totality of linguistic use or some of its areas. It must be composed of machine-readable texts suitable to be processed by a linguistic tool, with the aim of providing various and useful results for description and analysis. A corpus can be monolingual, bilingual or multilingual, parallel or comparable, synchronic or diachronic, general or terminological, made up of samples of a text genre, e.g. letters, laws, or of texts produced by a particular community, e.g. students, mental patients, lawyers.

Imagine a corpus as a vast, digital library of words and phrases collected from real texts, like a treasure trove of language, where we seek insights to understand and enhance our linguistic world.

I'd like to recommend SkeLL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) as a very user-friendly corpus that students can easily search for themselves. It shows learners a selection of concordance lines alongside a range of frequent collocations, without any knowledge of R or SQL required.

Data Format and Tools: Corpora can be stored in various formats, such as plain text, XML, or databases. Familiarize yourself with the data format and any tools or software required to work with the corpus effectively. Some corpora have specialized software for querying and analysis. Data Preprocessing: Depending on your research goals, you may need to preprocess the data, such as cleaning, tokenizing, and annotating it. This step is essential for ensuring that the data is suitable for analysis.

The most widely known collection of corpora for the English language is listed on english-corpora.org. You can also access free corpora on SketchEngine, Lextutor etc. But most importantly, there is always an opportunity to compile your own corpora - usually it is a collection of txt files. They can be uploaded to embedded online corpus analysis tools, such as SketchEngine, or free offline softwares, which include AntConc and LancsBox. These tools allow you to see such aspects of language use as frequency, context, collocates etc.

Corpus is a great linguistic tool, it enhances user experience. During my work at Binomo, I gathered a variety of texts, including emails, newsletters, website articles, and posts. Using a tool called AntConc, I created a list of the most frequently used words in our communication (frequency dictionary). I then refined this list by removing common but less meaningful words like prepositions. We collaborated with our UX-writers, wrote and translated a Trader's Glossary for our fintech platform, making it easier for newcomers to understand and adapt to the world of finance and technology.

To exploit a corpus, whether it's a large corpus available online or an ad hoc corpus created for a specific purpose, possibly a disposable one, it is useful to master regular expressions (regex), which are commonly used in languages like Perl. Nowadays, linguistic tools created for corpus analysis are more user-friendly, making the task easier for beginners. Additionally, a corpus can be explored using R or Python packages.

Corpora offer valuable insights into current linguistic usage and word meanings due to their real-world text composition, while dictionaries, as static references, may struggle to keep pace with evolving language, making corpora more suitable for understanding contemporary language use. Nevertheless, dictionaries remain useful for providing definitions, usage examples, and language-related information, particularly for learners and writers. Exploring a specialized corpus helps us to get to know, for example, the linguistic uses of a particular professional group Studying language through real-world examples enhances our comprehension and mastery of a language.

Although grammar usage analysis through corpus analysis can be beneficial for language learning, one needs to bear in mind that corpora often reflect the way the society uses a language than it "must" be used, i.e. it is more descriptive than prescriptive. Prescriptivism aside, it can be a great tool for both synchronic, as well as diachronic linguistics, meaning one can track language changes through time. It is also great for translations! :)

As corpora provide examples of authentic language use, they allow the foreign language speakers get an understanding of whether the word or phrase they have formed is applied correctly. All that is left to do is to insert the word or phrase into the search box and see how many instances, if any, there are in the corpus. When in doubt, both versions can be checked - usually, the more frequent one is a wiser choice.

In the majority of corpora, there is a section of metadata, providing the information on the text source. It can be used as an excellent example of referencing, as well as become instrumental in finding the source for a citation you would like to insert.

Ideally, you should be able to choose a corpus that suits your specific interests and objectives. However, there are languages for which it is difficult to find large corpora available online. English is a commonly favored language in this regard. Specialized corpora in various languages exist, related to different fields such as medicine, law, science, literature, or general language use, but it may be necessary to search for this information. Creating your own corpus is a potential solution. In fact, there are corpus compilation tools that make it possible by scraping online texts. You can use the web as a corpus using boolean operators, although the internet is not a curated corpus created for specific purposes.