Think of a question you have about how English is used. To find the answer, perhaps you might ask a friend what they think? Perhaps you could ask your whole class, so you’d have a better idea about how representative the answer is? Imagine if you could ask your whole neighbourhood? Imagine if you could ask your whole city or even your country?

This is how corpus linguistics works. Because we gather data from a huge range of speakers and writers of English, we can identify the typical use of words and phrases. These frequent words and patterns are the ones we include in our courses – they’re based on evidence drawn from a huge sample of language and not on the values or intuition of one person.