RCPCE Profession-specific Corpora
RCPCE has developed a collection of profession-specific corpora that contain authentic spoken and written texts from a wide range of professional settings. The collection also includes multidisciplinary corpora of research articles published in leading international journals. It therefore provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in professional communication. Users can explore language use in different professions, investigate communication practices in authentic contexts, and conduct corpus-based research. The resources also support classroom teaching, independent learning, and the development of professional communication skills. RCPCE allows users to search for words, phrases, concgrams, and part-of-speech patterns across the corpora. Tutorials are available to help new users get started, and publications based on the RCPCE corpora are also available. For enquiries about the corpora or the search tools, please contact engl.rcpce@polyu.edu.hk.
Explore more at http://rcpce.engl.polyu.edu.hk/index.html
Learning English with RCPCE Profession-specific Corpora
Professor Sal Consoli has prepared a series of worksheets designed for secondary school leavers and first-year university students seeking to strengthen their academic English skills. Suitable for both classroom instruction and independent study, these interactive tasks guide users through the RCPCE Profession-specific Corpora to foster core academic competencies, including collaborative learning, academic authorship, and specialized vocabulary building.
Corpus Materials: Increase of / Increase in (PDF)
Corpus Materials: Energy (PDF)
Children’s Literature Teaching Resources
Children’s Literature in English Language Teaching for Primary Students in Hong Kong (CLELT).
The CLELT project has developed a collection of lesson plans and teaching materials based on ten children's picture books. These resources are designed to support English language teaching in Hong Kong primary schools and can be downloaded for classroom use. For more information about the project, please feel free to read the news on PULSE@PolyU page.
Some resources, including video interviews with the authors, are password protected. To request access, please contact engl.rcpce@polyu.edu.hk.
Surprise-Words Analysis Tool (SWAT)
This tool was developed by Paul Baker in 2026. A surprise word is a word whose collocates markedly diverge when compared across two corpora. The tool compares the words across two corpora and ranks them in order of the extent to which their collocates differ. Like the keywords technique, it can be used as a “way in” to a corpus, although instead of identifying differences in relative frequencies, it identifies differences in word use or meaning. The tool is free to use.
For more information or to cite the tool, please refer to the following Open Access article:
Baker, P. (2026). Surprise Words and Core Words: Collocational Divergence Across Corpora. Applied Corpus Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2026.100220
Concgrams, ConcGram and ConcGramCore
Please click here to learn more about concgramming, the ConcGram software, or to download a free copy of ConcGramCore software that can search concgrams in your corpus automatically.
