What is British National Corpus

Since its emergence, corpora have made investigating language possible in a precise and objective way. Language practitioners are now equipped with concordancing tools that can check millions of utterances in seconds. These tools have caused a revolution in processing and analyzing a language for different purposes. Teachers now can examine the information in a textbook by referring back to corpus tools, keep track of the target language use, and infer generalizations that are hardly provided by traditional language books. After presenting a theoretical and historical overview of corpora and concordancers, this chapter discusses the role of corpora and concordancing tools in English language teaching (ELT), specifically in vocabulary instruction, and presents four corpus-based activity ideas that the classroom practitioners can easily utilize in their classes.