Cambridge English Corpus

The language in our teaching materials is guaranteed to be relevant and up to date.

We use our world-leading Cambridge English Corpus across our products. This means that we teach learners useful, current language. It's also language that they will encounter every day in their lives.

We use the corpus to observe and track how language is changing. It also helps us identify common learner errors and problems. This helps support learners' individual needs – because every learner is different.

What is a corpus?

A corpus is a massive electronic collection of spoken and written English examples. We use our corpus to answer questions about English vocabulary, grammar and usage. This works in a similar way to how you might look for information using a search engine.

How does a corpus work?

We gather data from a huge range of speakers and writers of English. This means we can identify the typical use of words and phrases.

These frequent words and patterns are the ones we include in our courses. They're based on evidence drawn from a huge sample of language and not on the values or intuition of one person.

The Cambridge Learner Corpus

We collect and analyse learner writing and we have an unparalleled collection. This allows us to see how learners around the world acquire and use language. We can then analyse how they're similar and where there are differences.

This helps us provide tailored and comprehensive support to groups of similar learners. For example, those with the same first language or who are at the same level in their learning.