Using Corpora for our lessons

Hi!

In this post we are going to speak about Corpora, which are online tools to see how a word is used within a specific context.
This tool could be of great help when we are not exaclty sure as to how to use a word or expression, these tools will provide us with plenty of examples which may help us understand how it should be used.
For this post, we are going to use two types of Corpora:

• The British National Corpus: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
• Linguee: http://www.linguee.es/ 

As an example for this post, we have looked a quite common collocation: keep in touch.
As we can see, Linguee offers as some translations of the different parts of the collocation, as well as a large number of examples that will help us see how it is used. Morover, it provides us similar expressions using those words (keep sth, keep to, touch, touch sth/sb), again creating a learning cycle that will help us learn new words and expressions.

On the other hand, the British National Corpus has provided us with up to 224 examples of this expression, which could help us understand the different contexts this word is used.

I hope this information has been of use to you. See you soon!