Talking about the weather: exploring collocation with SkELL

Despite the ever-increasing availability and variety of corpora, their use in the EFL/EAP classroom is by no means commonplace. Some of the reasons for this are explored by Breyer (2009) and Kilgarriff et al (2015), and they may relate to the uncontrolled nature of the language being presented to the students in the form of concordances. The present lesson gets round this problem by exploiting the simplified Sketch Engine for Language Learning (SkELL) interface to the SketchEngine corpora (Baisa & Suchomel, 2014). SkELL delivers a list of full-sentence examples for search terms, placing, near the top of the list, relatively short sentences with a high proportion of frequently occurring words, thus minimizing the chances of students’ encountering unfamiliar vocabulary that hinders understanding (Kilgarriff et al, 2015). SkELL is designed so that students can, with very little preamble or training, quickly start exploring typical sentences and collocations for their chosen search terms.