This page includes a number of text analysis tools which can help you develop your general and academic vocabulary, including collocations, and find examples of these words in context. Instructions on how to use these tools can be found here.
The Oxford Text Checker allows you to analyse texts against the Oxford 3000 (a list of the 3000 most useful words for learners of English to know), the Oxford 5000 (an expanded list for advanced speakers) and OPAL (Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon). More information about the Oxford 3000 and 5000 and OPAL is available on other tabs on this LibGuide.
If you have ever wondered how academic your text sounds or the level of the words you are using, you can find out by checking the results. You can also create word lists based on the texts that you enter into the text checker (and these can be filtered). For example, you can highlight and create a list of OPAL words only, or you can make a combined list of OPAL words and C1 level words.
Birmingham City University's Webcorp allows you to create a concordance for any word by generating examples from the internet. In addition, it has a useful tool that can generate a wordlist for any text. If you then click on any of the words in the generated list, you will find example sentences with these words, which allow you to better understand how these words are used in context and to notice preposition use and common collocations.
The Flax Corpus has many useful tools including PhD abstracts that can be analysed for language and an easy-to-use collocation tool. The best place to start is the Learning Collocations tool.
Collocations, put simply, are two or more words that are often used together (e.g. do homework, highly recommend, fake news etc.). Flax reveals collocational patterns by looking across the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) reference corpus, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of 2500 university student writing texts and the Wikipedia crowd-sourced corpus of three million articles.
The site also features the "Cherry Basket" for saving collocations from across the corpora using the Cherry Picking function, where collocations can be stored for re-use and printed or saved as export files.
Use this tool to highlight words from the AWL (Academic Word List). Enter the text in the box below then click 'submit'. The AWL is a list of the most common academic words, similar to the Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon (OPAL). More information on the AWL can be found on the AWL tab on this LibGuide.