Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics

Important Information

This year’s event will take place from Wednesday 24 to Friday 26 June 2026 on Zoom.

• Booking is now open.
  • Cost: £175 per person (£195 after 14 May).
  • We have discount rates for groups of 5 or more students. Email us for more info.
• Places are limited and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Attendees are entitled to the Special Offer on our corpora. Students get a free copy.
• The Provisional Timetable is below.
• If you have any enquiries, email us!

About the Summer School

The Summer School is an introduction to Corpus Linguistics for students of language and linguistics and teachers of English. Participants should have a basic knowledge of English linguistics and grammar. Students will gain experience with a state-of-art corpus and an understanding of basic statistical ideas.

Our Summer School course began in 2013, in face-to-face classes at UCL in Central London. The course is designed to give students a deep understanding of Corpus Linguistics. In our original face-to-face version, class sizes were limited to 30 places, with two or three lecturers who teach together, allowing students the opportunity to ask questions and discuss issues. Since switching online, we have expanded the course due to high demand.

To give you a flavour of the course in previous years, one participant commented:

Aims and Objectives

Over the course of the three days, participants learn about the following:

• the scope of Corpus Linguistics, and how we can use it to study the English Language;
• key issues in Corpus Linguistics methodology;
• how to use corpora to analyse issues in syntax, semantics, discourse and World Englishes;
• basic elements of statistics;
• how to navigate large and small corpora, particularly ICE-GB and DCPSE.
   

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, participants should have:

• acquired a basic but solid knowledge of the terminology, concepts and methodologies used in English Corpus Linguistics;
• had practical experience working with two state-of-the-art corpora and a corpus exploration tool (ICECUP);
• have gained an understanding of the breadth of Corpus Linguistics and the potential application for projects;
• have learned about the fundamental concepts of inferential statistics and their practical application to Corpus Linguistics.
   

Further details

This course is an online version

The course is very much a practical, hands-on course.

Students focus on two particular corpora, both developed at UCL. These are the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English (DCPSE). These corpora consist of authentic samples of written and spoken English and are unusual in that they are fully parsed, i.e. they contain a complete grammatical tree analysis for every sentence. Students will use the state-of-art software developed for research with grammatical treebanks, ICECUP, to explore these rich resources.

Students are taught statistics fundamentals from the ground up, from probability theory to distributions, confidence intervals and statistical tests. No prior knowledge of statistics is assumed.

Special Offer — ICE-GB or DCPSE

• Students in full-time education: free copy of ICE-GB or DCPSE (Student License)
• All other registrants: 25% discount for either
  • ICE-GB (Individual License): £273.75 excl. VAT (regular price £365)*
  • DCPSE (Individual License): £261.75 excl. VAT (regular price £349)*

*In the UK, additional VAT at 20% is payable.

Compatibility: The ICECUP software requires Windows to run, and has been designed to work efficiently on computers from Windows XP to 11. (It will also run on a Mac using Windows and an emulator such as VirtualBox.) You may also wish to check if your university has a license – many colleges are now running ICECUP on institutional Windows servers.

All attendees to the summer school will be given temporary access to ICE-GB.

Special Offer Conditions: Each student applicant for the course is entitled to one copy of one corpus and a licence in their name. We distribute copies by digital download before the Summer School to allow students to install it in advance.

​​​​​​If you are not a student and wish to take advantage of the special offer, please email us. We advise customers to buy the corpus as normal on the online store, following which we will reimburse the purchaser’s credit card for the 25% reduction. Let us know in advance before you wish to do this.

For licence terms and general ordering information see the links below.

• How to order ICE-GB
• How to order DCPSE

What Students Say

This course has run face-to-face in UCL for several years. We had extremely positive feedback from those who attended — as the following sample comments from previous years indicate:

Provisional Timetable

Staff

Summer School

• Important Information
• About the Summer School
• Aims and Objectives
• Special Offer on ICE-GB and DCPSE
• What Students Say
• Provisional Timetable
• Staff