Discovering English with Sketch Engine

"Discovering English with the Sketch Engine" is the title of a new book (Thomas, 2014) which introduces the use of corpora in language study, teaching, writing and translating. It focuses on using the Sketch Engine to identify patterns of normal usage in many aspects of English ranging from morphology to discourse and pragmatics. This paper discusses the findings from the most recent semester when corpora were used by three different groups of university students studying English for different ends. It was found that learners who are capable of drawing conclusions from data are quick to recognize the potential of corpora. Through training in the relevant aspects of linguistics and the software, all 60 students were able to create and exploit corpora. Although the book itself was still under development, its approach was piloted on these students using extended excerpts and was demonstrated to be of value in fulfilling quite different needs. [For full proceedings, see ED565087.].