Using WebCorp to Learn American Slang Terms and Idioms

WebCorp is a new tool being developed by a research team at Birmingham City University. I first encountered this tool last year and have fallen in love with it since then. WebCorp stands for The Web as a Corpus, which shows the design of this corpus--all information is directly from web resources.

Web language nowadays is probably one of the most diverse and fast-growing language in the world. New coinages appear on a daily basis through different types of internet media and soon become widespread. To most effectively utilize a powerful tool like WebCorp, I have designed the following two types of activities for intermediate-advanced ESL learners.

1. Using WebCorp to learn new terms/slang language:
    Many of my students are interested to learn some commonly used academic slang terms. WebCorp could be an ideal tool to realize this in an effective way. For example, when you hear your American classmates say "pull an all nighter", what does it mean? The following is a screenshot of the concordance lines containing this useful colloquial expression from different English websites:

It is worthwhile noting that like other popular online corpora (e.g., COCA, MICASE), WebCorp also has the function of expanding the context to more words. Therefore, if we are curious to see a more complete context of this phrase while in use, we can click one of the concordances and more context will reveal.

2. Using WebCorp to learn American idioms:
Idioms are probably the hardest part in learning any language. On the other hand, they are also the most interesting and useful to learn if one is interested in knowing about the target language culture. I know some ESL classes have a special focus on learning American idioms, and the following activity may help to shed some lights on how to realize the understanding and use of idioms among international students.

Example activity: You've discussed the idiom "The A to Z of something" in your class; however, the students still have trouble using this idiom and would like to see more contextual usages. Let's use WebCorp to solve this problem! First, type in "The A to Z of" into the search box, and choose the language as "English". Click search and you should be able to see some concordance lines like the following:

Now, the default setting from WebCorp is for the search results to show under each URL, which may take a while for all results to show. Once all results are shown, one can then choose to see only the concordance lines without the URLs. I personally prefer the ones without URLs because they are easier to use in figuring out a pattern. The following is an example of another idiom "play... ace" without URLs.

Overall, WebCorp is a fun tool to play with for intermediate-advanced learners in learning new coinages and idioms. A major downside of this tool is that the search result may take a while to appear and one has to patiently wait till all results appear to choose other research options (e.g., not showing URLs). Despite this, I would still strongly recommend teachers to introduce WebCorp as a helpful resource to learners who are ready and eager to explore the language world of the internet.