Learning english on the sketch engine platform

II. Main part
It is no exaggeration to say that in 2014 corpus linguistics has fundamentally changed our view of how language works. They brought out a mono-lingual learner dictionary (MLD), such as the ground-breaking COBUILD (1987) and a corpus informed grammar such as Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finnegan, 1999). The dictionary contains a substantial amount of grammatical information and the grammar contains just as much lexical information. The interdependence of these two aspects of language is analytically demonstrated on almost every page of these books and their other kinds, through the use of corpora. Publishers such as Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and HarperCollins all use the Sketch Engine in the preparation of dictionaries which makes it a resource worth putting in the hands of foreign language users. The central function of the Sketch Engine is the word sketch, which is used to reveal how words behave collocationally and grammatically within a corpus. These were originally developed in order to help with lexicography, and are now used widely within language research and education in general.
The core system functions consist of the following tools:

1. 
   Concordance searches a corpus for a word form, a lemma, a phrase, a part of speech tag, etc.
   
2. 
   Collocations calculates words that are statistically associated with the query term.
   
3. 
   Word Sketch generates summaries of a word’s grammatical and collocational behavior using “sketch grammar”.
   
4. 
   Thesaurus creates a distributional thesaurus based on common collocation.
   

Corpus approach is underrated in language education. According to the British Council Annual Report (2010), a large percentage of 15 million English teachers in the world do not know anything about corpora and do not realize how they can be used in learning and teaching language. However, modern ELT classrooms are usually well-equipped to incorporate corpus methods. The Sketch Engine has come out of the academic research world, and, naturally, many of its users are in universities. The Sketch Engine is widely used for English Language Teaching, and occasionally also for the teaching of other languages including Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. Translators find corpora (of specific domains) useful for identifying the terminology and phraseology of the domain, in the language they are translating into. A number of professional translators are Sketch Engine users. A word list (with frequencies) for a language is a central resource for almost any language technology application, from speech recognition to spelling correction to text prediction. The corpora in the Sketch Engine provide the raw material, and the software can produce the word lists (and also many other lists: of n-grams, keywords, lemmas, terms) for many languages. The Sketch Engine aims to cover all the large languages of the world, as well as any languages which particular users are asking for. By a 'large language' we mean a language with a large number of speakers.