ELT Corpus

The reason for building this corpus is to have a source of words, phrases and example sentences that contains enough examples of all the words in the topics that are commonly studied in foreign language learning, which in fact, large general corpora do.

And that the corpus be structured in sections (subcorpora) representing each topic, which can only be achieved by building it with this in mind. The metadata in general corpora mostly indicates text types, dates, regional varieties etc of the source data.

The procedure involved:

• 1. choosing a set of topics

  2. preparing extensive lists of nouns for each topic

  3. dividing the lists into elementary, intermediate and advanced based mainly on the source of the lists, but with some general frequency rankings and intuition

  4. breaking the lists into sets of 20, as this is the maximum number of words that WebBootCat can crawl. WBC is a web-based tool, part of the Sketch Engine suite of corpus tools, that crawls the web for sets of words and builds a corpus of the texts found.

  5. all of the data sets for each topic were combined into subcorpora