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Concordancers for Academic English Study
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Feb 24, 2024
A concordancer is a computer program which is used to search through a corpus, in other words a collection of texts. This video reviews the four main online concordancers for academic English study: Lextutur; BNC; MICUSP; and SKELL. ▬ Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 00:00 Intro 00:25 What is a concordancer? 02:12 Lextutor 07:43 BNC 14:07 MICUSP 16:53 SKELL 19:35 Summary (language) 21:02 Summary (features) ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Video created using VideoScribe software [affiliate link]: https://tidd.ly/37VdIB7 Concordancers function like search engines, providing a list of sentences containing the search term or other information such as frequency. This allows the user to look for patterns, to see how common a word or phrase is, or to understand how the word is used, for example whether it commonly combines with particular words or phrases (i.e. collocations) Concordancers search through a corpus (plural form corpora), which can consist of spoken or written texts, and can be collected according to many different principles. For example, there are corpora for newspaper articles, fiction, web pages, as well as for academic English (spoken and written). Some corpora have thousands of words, while others have millions or even billions of words.
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0:00
This video is brought to you by eapfoundation.com, the website for all your academic English needs
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So this video looks at concordances for academic English study. There are two parts. First we'll see what a concordance is
0:14
And then we'll look at four online concordances. Namely, Legstuter, the BNC concordance, myCUSP and SCEL
0:25
First then, what is a concordance? A concordance is a computer program which is used to search through a corpus
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A corpus is a collection of texts. The plural of the word is corpora
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These texts can be grouped according to many different classifications. So we could have a corpus for newspaper articles, a corpus for fiction, a corpus for non-fiction texts
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a corpus of web pages, as well as corpora for academic English
0:54
which could be spoken academic English, presentations, lectures, discussions, or written academic English, essays, reports and so on
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And corpora vary in size. Some contain just a few thousand words
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Some may contain millions of words. Very large corpora may even contain billions of words
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A concordance functions very much like a search engine. But instead of a list of websites, it provides a list of sentences containing the search word
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And this is useful in order for you to look for patterns, to see how common a word or phrase is
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and to understand how a word or phrase is used. This video is going to be very practical
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So I'm going to show you how to improve writing using concordances
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To do this, we're going to start with this short example of a student piece of writing with some errors in it
1:44
Different from green energy, energy from coal will make many bad effects to the environment
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Figure 1 is showing some of these effects. So the errors here are different from make, bad, to, and is showing
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And we'll use each of those concordances to see how we can correct these errors
2:06
So let's begin by looking at the Legstuter concordance. So this is the Legstuter homepage
2:17
It has many different vocabulary tools, including a highlighter for the academic word list, which I reviewed in another video
2:23
So what we're interested in is the concordance. And you can see it has concordances for other languages besides English
2:29
So this is the interface for the Legstuter concordance. One of the great things about the Legstuter concordance is that there are many different corpora that you can use
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So it defaults to the BAWE, the British Academic Written English corpus, which has 8 million words
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There's also the BASE, the British Academic Spoken English corpus. There's a corpus of Academic Abstracts
2:50
There's the BNC, COCA, the corpus of Contemporary American English. There's a corpus for Jane Austen's works, Presidential Speeches, Shakespeare's works, and Wikipedia
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The BAWE, which it defaults to, is a very nice corpus and the one I normally use, so we'll just leave it on that one
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So let's start off by searching for the word effect and pressing Enter
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There are other settings that we can change, but my experience with students is it's easier to change the settings after the first search
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So that's what we'll do here. So we need to wait while it's assembling the data
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OK, so here are the results. These are the concordance lines with the word effect
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There are 2,788 in total. At the moment, these results are not sorted in any way
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One thing I'm interested in is adjectives which can be used with effect. So let me search again, and this time sort by words to the left
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So here are the results. We can see adverse effect is quite common
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An effect. And effect. If we scroll down to the end of the page, we can actually see the relative frequencies of words which occur to the left of effect
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This is one negative of the site, because this information would be much more useful at the top of the page
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The most common adjective is negative, which occurs 63 times. And that has the same meaning as the word bad
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There's also the word detrimental 26 times, and adverse 15 times. So those three adjectives might be a better alternative to the word bad
4:24
Something else we can do is we can look for pairs of words. In this box where it says plus a sock, which means associated with, I'm going to put the word negative
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And next to that it says on left, and that's what we want. Words which are associated on the left with the word effect
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So here you can see all the examples of negative with the word effect. And this should actually give us more information
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So we can see here had a strong negative effect. Have the negative effect
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Has a profound negative effect. Have some negative effect on, and so on
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So we can now see that the correct verb to use with effect is have
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Have an effect. How about the preposition which goes to the right
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Well this time I'll keep the same search, but I will sort by words which occur to the right
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We can see that of occurs a few times, but that's not the right sentence structure
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The negative effect of. If we look for examples with a verb, we see the verb have a negative effect on
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So in addition to have being the correct verb, we can see that the correct preposition is on
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You can see the example extract is rather short. We can actually click on the keyword to see it in its full context
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So how about the other problems that we had in the student writing? Well let's search this time for different from
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And this time it needs to be associated on the right. Let's wait for the results
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Okay, so here are the results. So scroll down to different from
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The keyword, in this case different, is all in capitals, which makes it a little bit difficult to see the punctuation
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But if we look at the example sentences closely, we can see that different from always occurs in the middle of a sentence
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It never occurs at the beginning of a sentence. So that's the problem with that student's use of that transition
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It doesn't occur at the beginning of a sentence. Let's also look for figure
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Let's try searching for figure one. And this time it's a bit difficult to see the results
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So let me change that search. Instead of searching for figure one, let me search for figure show
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Because one of the good things about the LexTutor Concordance is it will match word forms, not just the exact word
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So here we can see examples of figure with show. Figure one, nineteen, shows
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Figure one, one, shows. Figure ten, shows. So we can see very quickly that we need to use the present simple tense here, shows
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Not present continuous, it's showing. One other thing which I'll show you here very quickly is that we can also sort words according to the sub-corpus
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In this case the frequency information is presented at the top of the page with better formatting, so this is much more useful
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So these results are again for figure associated on the right with the word show
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We can see this occurs most commonly in the engineering sub-corpus, 77 times
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But also quite frequently in physics, 70 times, biology, 50 times, meteorology
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So we can deduce from that that the word figure associated with the verb show is more common in science subjects than other disciplines
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Next let's look at the BNC Concordance. BNC is short for British National Corpus and this was created by Oxford University Press
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It's a corpus that contains 100 million words. This corpus covers a wide range of genres including spoken text, fiction, magazines, newspapers and academic texts
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In order to use the BNC Concordance you first need to log in, which is a very simple process
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To use the BNC Concordance you first need to log in, which means you first need to register for an account
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Registration is free and fairly straightforward. So this is the registration page where you need to fill in some details such as your name, email address and so on
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The free account has some limitations, the main one being you can only make 50 queries a day compared to 200 queries for a paid account
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But for ordinary use this is going to be enough. So this is the homepage of the BNC Concordance
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You can see the search area on the left and some information about it on the right. There are different things we can do with this concordance
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You see a list, chart, collocates, we can compare words and KWIC which is Keyword in Context Display
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So let's start off with list. Let's begin by searching again for the word effect
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And you can see that this occurs 22,887 times. But this is in all the corpus and not just the academic section
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If you want to conduct searches in the academic section then we need to choose that
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So we click on section here and select academic. And then if I search again we see that there are now fewer results, 8099
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If I click on the word effect here we can see some examples of the word in context
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Next I'm going to look at the collocates tab. So this is useful for finding collocations of the keyword
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And we can search up to four words to the left or four words to the right
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For this search I'm just going to choose one word to the left
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Again it's still on the academic section. So let me search. And these are the results
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Here it shows frequency in the academic section as well as frequency overall
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You can see this is very visual so it shows very quickly the relative frequency of these different collocates
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Some of these are just simple words. It's no, give, into. But we can also see some adjective and noun collocations
10:05
Direct effect, significant effect, adverse effect. The adjective negative is actually quite low down, number 35, with a frequency of 18
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That compares to adverse which is 8th in the list, a frequency of 50
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So the collocation adverse effect is more frequent in the BNC than it was in the BAWE using LexTutor
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And if I click on the word adverse I can see some examples of that collocation in some sentences
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So now I'm going to do a keyword in context search. Let's sort the results by the word one to the left because I'm interested in adjective collocations with effect
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So let me search and wait for the result. And this shows some rather interesting information
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So it's colour coded with blue being the nouns, pink for verbs, yellow for prepositions
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So I can see fairly quickly that the word have goes with the word effect
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Can have an adverse effect on. And it's often followed by the word on which is shown in yellow
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Having the desired effect on. Have the desired effect. Have a dramatic effect on
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And so on. The chart tab is really useful for showing comparisons across different sections of the corpus
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So let me show you an example for the word bad. OK, we need to wait a while
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This is one of the features I don't like about this site. Which is unless you have a premium account it will sometimes pause and ask you to upgrade your account for a fee
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So we need to wait a little while here. OK, let's continue
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So here you can see that the word bad has the lowest frequency in the academic corpus
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It's used much more frequently in non-academic text, newspapers, magazines and especially spoken English
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Now let's see what adverse looks like in the different sections. So you can see that adverse is used most frequently in academic text
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Much less frequently in non-academic text. And very rarely in fiction or spoken English
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There are some other options that you can change here but I won't go into those because they are a bit technical and some of them need a premium account in order for you to change them
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What you will do though is to look at some of those other examples. So let's look for the word different
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Again a keyword in context search. This time I'll sort by words to the right
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Because I'm interested in the phrase different from. So here you can see that unlike lextutor the formatting of the original is retained
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So we have a small d if the word is in the middle of a sentence and a capital d if it's at the beginning of a sentence
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So if I scroll down to different from. These examples here. You can see it's always a small d. It's always in the middle of a sentence
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Is very different from. Are very different from. Let's look at the other example I had
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So let's search for figure. Again one word to the right. Okay it's asking me to upgrade the account again
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Let's try that again. Okay so here we are
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So here we're interested in the verbs which follow. Which remember are in pink
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So figure one shows. Figure one illustrates. Depicts. Shows. Illustrates. Presents. So again we can very easily see here that the present simple tense is used with the word figure
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We can also see some interesting alternatives to the word shows. For example illustrates
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Next let's look at the MICASP concordance. This concordance is used as a corpus of 2.6 million words from 829 student papers submitted to Michigan University
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So it goes without saying that this is an academic corpus. As with the other concordances I'm going to begin by searching for the word effect
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So this concordance gives us some very interesting information. The first thing it shows here is how often it occurs in different disciplines
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This is the raw data. It's much more useful to show frequency per 10,000 words
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We can see very clearly that the word effect occurs most commonly in the economics discipline
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11.89 times per 10,000 words. It also occurs very commonly in physics
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10.49 per 10,000 words. That's more than double the frequency of the next discipline
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Which is 4.66. Something else which is unique to this corpus is showing the distribution across paper types
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So we can see the word effect occurs most commonly in research papers, 39%, and reports, 37%
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Something else which is different about this concordance is that instead of concordance lines it shows a very extended example
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This definitely makes it more difficult to look at patterns and to find collocations
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Nevertheless we can see that the word effect goes with the verb have and the preposition on
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Have had a great effect on. If we search for the word figure we don't get any good results, at least not on the first page
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Something we can do with this concordance though is to search for more than one word
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So let's search for the phrase different from. And here we have lots of examples which all show that this is used in the middle of a sentence with the verb to be
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This is quite different from. Can be very different from. Are different from
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To be significantly different from. And so on. This corpus remember is made up of upper level student papers, in other words very good student writing
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And we can actually filter our search in many different ways. So we can change the student levels from undergraduate to first, second and third year graduate
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We can look for native or non-native speaker use. We can look for language in the abstract, definitions, literature review and so on
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We can limit to just certain paper types like argumentative essay or report or research paper
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And we can also limit our search to different disciplines, biology, economics and so on
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So although this concordance has some drawbacks, it definitely has some features which the other ones lack
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Finally let's look at the scale concordance. So scale is short for Sketch Engine for Language Learning
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This is a free simplified interface of the more advanced and subscription only corpus tool Sketch Engine
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The scale concordance uses its own corpus which comes from a range of genres
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News, books, blogs, Wikipedia which accounts for 39%, other web pages which account for 31% and also the British National Corpus at 9%
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And although this includes the academic corpus of the BNC, this is not an academic corpus
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But it's still very useful for academic study as we'll see. So scale is definitely the easiest of the concordances to use
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Again let's search for the word effect. So it immediately brings up examples of the word in context
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These examples are very different from the ones that we've already seen because they're all very short
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And there is always exactly 40 of them. So on the one hand this makes the examples very simple
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On the other hand it makes them a bit limited. If we click on the Similar Words tab we have words which are similar to effect
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Maybe the most useful part of scale is the word sketch area. So here we can see different words which associate with the keyword effect
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So we have verbs with effect as the subject. So effect occurs
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And if we hover over that word we can see more examples. Over here we have verbs with effect as object
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And the one at the top the most frequent is have. So this shows us that have is the most common verb that goes with effect
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Although interestingly it doesn't have the structure have an effect on. And then down here we have modifiers of effect
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In other words adjectives which could be used with effect. So you can see that adverse is very high up in the list
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Adverse effects. Negative is actually third in the list. Negative effects. Here you can see some other words which associate with effect
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The main one being cause. Cause and effect. The difficulty lies in separating cause and effect
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Let's try searching this time for figure. So this time we're interested in verbs with figure as a subject
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So you can see show at the top. Figures show. Illustrate is also high in the list
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The figure below illustrates operations of dynamic logic. So present simple again is the tense that's used
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And at the end a verb we saw before. Depict. If I try searching for different I don't actually get any information that's useful
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Even if I look at the example sentences I can't see the phrase different from
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So scale is not so useful for finding that particular problem. And remember it's not an academic corpus
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So let me now summarise some of the things that we've learned. I'll begin with a language summary
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So we've seen that the phrase different from can't be used at the beginning of a sentence
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It combines with the verb to be. To be different from. We've seen that the noun effect goes with the verb to have
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To have an effect. And the preposition on. To have an effect on
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We also saw that bad is not an academic word. Negative is a more academic adjective
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To have a negative effect on. But we also saw that adverse and detrimental can be used instead
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To have an adverse effect on. To have a detrimental effect on
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And we also saw that verbs following figure one should use the present simple
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Figure one shows. Although again we saw some possible alternatives. Illustrates. Figure one illustrates
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Or depicts. Figure one depicts. So with that information we should now be able to correct the errors in the student writing
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The first one is a bit difficult because although we saw that different from can't begin a sentence we didn't see any alternatives
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The word unlike can be used here. Unlike green energy. But we did see how to fix the other problems
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So instead of make we should use the verb have. Have many adverse effects
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Or we could also say negative effects. On the environment. Figure one shows some of these effects
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Or we could also say illustrates. Finally let's summarise the different features of these concordances
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Lake Stuta. The BNC. MyCusp. And Skel. The good news is that all of these are free to use
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The BNC requires registration first before you can use it but the other ones don't
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Lake Stuta is maybe the most powerful because it has more than one corpus
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Whereas the other ones use their own corpus. All of them use an academic corpus except for Skel
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If you want to see how words are used in different disciplines. For example biology, engineering, economics, psychology
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Only Lake Stuta and MyCusp will do that for us. If we're interested in looking at how words and phrases are used in different writing types
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Like reports, argumentative essays and so on. Only MyCusp will do that
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And all of them are useful for collocation study with the possible exception of MyCusp
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Because the extracts are rather too long to do that simply. In short all of the concordances have features which make them useful for academic English study
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For more information on concordances and other aspects of academic English. Please visit the website eapfoundation.com
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As well as more detailed information about concordances. You can find a worksheet for use with this video and others on the channel
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Visit eapfoundation.com Finally if you're interested in exploring corpora in more detail to improve academic writing
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There's a great book on this topic. It's called Academic Writing with Corpora
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A resource book for data-driven learning. This was written by Tatiana Karpenko-Sikkim and is published by Routledge
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You can find a link in the description below. And there's also a review of the book on the eapfoundation.com website
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And there's also a review of the book on the eapfoundation.com website
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