Week Name Description
Writing term papers Page Structuring & writing your term paper

Writing academic texts is something every student has to learn. Luckily, there is an abundance of tutorials how to write a term paper and you do not have to reinvent the wheel as most papers follow a relatively simple structure. This section contains a handpicked list of resources that help you structure and write your paper.

Page Retrieving and handling secondary literature

This page contains a collection of links related to the retrieval and handling of secondary literature (including links to tutorials and recommended software).

Page Further helpful resources

This page contains a collection of useful links.
Highlight: The Academic Phrasebank

Are you looking for idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in the register of research articles? Then the Academic Phrasebank is perfect for you! It contains a collection of phraseological units that are commonly used in academic English. These are grouped by communicative purpose and section of the research article.

Quick Links URL BNCweb (on eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de, CQPweb Interface)

You can access the BNC with your BA-Account. No registration required.

URL Corpora hosted at the Chair of English Linguistics (COCA, COHA, NottDeuYTSch, GloWbE)

In a first step, you are required to authenticate with your BA-Account. In a second step, you have to either login or sign up for an account for the corpus platform. You must use your @stud.uni-bamberg.de or @uni-bamberg.de e-mail when signing up. If you encounter any problems, please contact Fabian Vetter.

URL Corpora @ SketchEngine.eu

The SketchEngine is a commercial corpus interface which was primarily developed with the needs of lexicographers in mind. What's unique about SE is that it features some (sadly rather opaque) algorithms for investigating how words are used in context. The functions are similar to the collocations function in CQPweb, but more intuitive. You can use SE to access a wide range of corpora (including the BNC and parallel corpora such as OPUS).

If you require access, please contact Fabian Vetter or Julia Schlüter.

URL Corpora @ Uni Lancaster (CQPweb)

Freely accessible corpora at the University of Lancaster, including the BNC, BNC2014 and the Brown familiy.

URL English-corpora.org

A campus licence for the COCA, COHA, BNC, GloWbE, NOW, Movies, TV and other corpora is available now. All students with a free user account for the corpora have advanced access rights when logging in on campus. This also works with a VPN connection from home.

Please note this works for only 30 students at a time, so please do not forget to log out once you're finished with your research.


URL Online questionnaires: LimeSurvey

LimeSurvey: Free online survey tool. The program is hosted by and the data is stored at the data center of the University of Bamberg.
Registration required. Please contact fabian.vetter@uni-bamberg.de

Software & tutorials for working with corpora and audio/video data URL Introduction to Corpus Basics (KorPLUS)
This is an open-resource self-learning package (produced at Bamberg University as part of the DiKuLe project) that is free to use for anyone interested in the application of corpora (large computer-readable text databases) to practical language problems in English.
URL BNCweb Manual
URL Wordsmith 5 Step-by-Step
URL Getting Started with ICECUP 3.1 (Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts)
URL AntConc Youtube channel
URL CQPweb Youtube Tutorials
File CQP Query Language (advanced queries) (Stefan Evert)
Page Querying Corpora: Simple Queries with wildcards
Page Advanced Corpus Queries with Regular Expressions
Page AntConc: Export KWIC view to MS Excel with keyword in separate column
URL EXMARaLDA Corpus tool suite

"EXMARaLDA is a system for working with oral corpora on a computer. It consists of a transcription and annotation tool (Partitur-Editor), a tool for managing corpora (Corpus-Manager) and a query and analysis tool (EXAKT)." (https://exmaralda.org/en/about-exmaralda/, 08.08.2023)

Page How to install Transcriber 1.5.1 with bugfix

URL Official documentation for Transcriber 1.5.1
URL ICE Corpora Transcription & Markup Guidelines
File Erste Schritte mit Transcriber
URL ELAN

ELAN is a tool for annotating audio and video data.

Page IPA Tools and Fonts

Types of corpora Page Synchronic multi-purpose Corpora

The corpora in this group

  • usually sample texts from many different registers in order to represent the language as it is used in one national variety.
  • are synchronic, i.e. contain only material from one specific point in time
  • contain present day English
Page Historical Corpora
Old, Middle and Early Modern English corpora.
Page Other Corpora: Spoken

Specialised spoken corpora.

Page Other Corpora: Written

Specialised written corpora. Highlights: ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English), Oxford Text Archive (OTA), TIME Magazine Corpus of American English.

Encyclopedias, Databases, and other useful links URL Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition)
URL International Encyclopedia of Linguistics
URL The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE)

"eWAVE is an interactive database on morphosyntactic variation in spontaneous spoken English mapping 235 features from a dozen domains of grammar in now 51 varieties of English (traditional dialects, high-contact mother-tongue Englishes, and indigenized second-language Englishes) and 26 English-based Pidgins and Creoles in eight Anglophone world regions (Africa, Asia, Australia, British Isles, Caribbean, North America, Pacific, and the South Atlantic; see here for a list)." (https://ewave-atlas.org/, 09.08.2023)

URL World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)
"The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors." (https://wals.info/, 09.08.2023)
URL The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery book.

URL Word for Linguistics (E-Ching Ng, Yale University)

Tips & tricks for using MS Word in linguistics. This author explains how you can draw and integrate phonetic symbols, syntax trees or glosses in your thesis.

URL Linguist List

A mailing list for linguists.

URL Quick selection tool for IPA characters
Data Visualization URL Templates for data visualization in MS Office by Lukas Sönning

Lukas Sönning created several templates for MS Office with which you can easily create professional visualizations for your data. The templates can be found in his OSF repository: https://osf.io/v37pw/.

Page Graphical methods for data analysis with R (lattice) by Lukas Sönning
Statistics URL Basic statistical methods for language research by Lukas Sönning
URL Introduction to statistics for corpus linguistics (Vaclav Brezina @ Uni Lancaster)

Vaclav Brezina created an interactive self-learning course on statistics for corpus linguistics. No background knowledge on statistics required.

File Simple Methods for Linguistic Research (Lukas Sönning, 5.11.15)
URL Entscheidungsbaum für statistische Verfahren (Universitäre Fernstudien Schweiz)
URL Methodenberatung (Uni Zürich)
URL Cookbook for R