British National Corpus (Week 4)

What?

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written.

BNC webpage

How to use it?

Step 1: Go to BNC website and you can see as above
Step 2: Type a word or phrase in the search box and press the Go button to see up to 50 random hits from the corpus.
Step 3: You can search for a single word or a phrase, restrict searches by part of speech, search in parts of the corpus only, and much more.
Step 4: The search result will show the total frequency in the corpus and up to 50 examples.

Suggested activities:

1. Pronunciation activity. Teacher can check students' pronunciation of the words. This is because the tool is describing the authenticity language use by native speaker.

2. Teacher can make a concordance games in a classroom. Teacher line up all the students and ask one another the concordance of words. If they are correct, they will get a point.

I like it because:

1. It shows to the students the word usage 'as it really is' which is an authentic examples
2. It shows a pattern of word grammar
3. The Corpus is not just a teacher or expect opinions, it is based on an evidence.

I don't like it because:

1. students may get confused because it gives a lot of example for one word.

Relevant site:

A video on Youtube gives you an idea of how to use BNC.