The main goals of the course are:

1. Comfortably navigate and search using a range of corpus tools, but with a specific focus on Sketch Engine and the British Academic Written English corpus
2. Generate, understand and extract patterns from concordance lines
3. Create a word’s collocational profile Identify subtle differences in meaning between similar words (theory/concept, cause/affect) that students struggle with
4. Create lists of frequent words and lexical chunks
5. Generate concordance lines that show specific syntactic/grammatical patterns
6. Create engaging corpus-based materials to use with your students in class

Not completely. You will get access to the first four units at the beginning of the course and then access to the next four modules a few weeks later. This is to avoid you rushing too quickly through it at the start. 

You will have access to the course until the end of July 2023. Please make sure you have completed all the units by that time. 

That really depends on you. We estimate that each unit takes around 4-7 hours to complete and there are eight units, so you can organise your time to make sure you complete everything before the end of the course. 

No. The idea behind the course is that you can work through it at times in the week that are suitable for you, whether that’s early morning, evening or weekends. During course the course we do offer some ‘drop in’ sessions, these are times when one of our tutors is available on Zoom if you have any questions about the course or would like clarification about anything. But you are not obliged to attend these. 

We do use some Google for some documents on the course. If you are in a country (e.g. China) where it isn’t possible to open those documents, please make sure you are using your university of Sheffield account details to access them via our University Connect for China service. You can find out more about it on this page of the University of Sheffield website. 

You need to complete all the units. Also,  at the end of the course there is a short form to fill out asking you to briefly reflect on what you have learnt on the course . If you do these two things, you will finish the course successfully and qualify for a certificate. There is no assessment/pass mark as such as we view this as a formative and developmental course.

Yes, you will, issued by the ELTC, University of Sheffield. However, there are no credits attached to this course, it’s purely developmental. Please note though that to receive the certificate, you need to complete all the units and the final reflection task.

If you are having any technical issues with the site or working through the course, please contact us on eltc.tel@sheffield.ac.uk and we’ll respond within 24 hours to deal with your problems. 

You should be able to access the website on either your phone or tablet just by going to the browser on your device and going to the site link. Most of the content should be visible and should fit well onto a mobile device.

This site stores your name and email address upon registration as well as any comments you make on individual posts or forums. At the end of the course or if you leave the course early, those details will be deleted. The site also stores your comments/forum posts and these will be deleted at the end of the course as well. None of this data is shared with any other individuals outside of the course tutors and will not be unless you give your explicit consent.