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The Survey of English Usage
Welcome to the new Survey of English Usage website, which is now part of the UCL English Department site.
This site is under construction. We hope you find what you are looking for, but note that some content has been moved, and some pages may not have been republished yet.
News, events and resources
The Survey of English Usage Annual Report for 2024 is now published.
Survey Seminars
The Survey of English Usage organises a number of seminars each year for staff and students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and beyond. They are generously sponsored by the English Department.
We had two speakers for the Spring term. On Tuesday 11 February, Amanda Thompson from the OED spoke about lexicography in 2025. On 4 March, we were pleased to welcome Kingsley Ugwuanyi from SOAS, who discussed the codification of Nigerian English.
New Substack on English Grammar by Bas Aarts
Posts on this new Substack are on English grammar in general, but with a special focus on sentence analysis, intended for those who know some grammar already.
Bas will regularly discuss the structure of phrases and clauses, using the framework of his Oxford Modern English Grammar (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Online Courses
FutureLearn courses
English Grammar: All You Need to Know is a six-week course for anyone who is interested in the topic which takes an in-depth look at the nuts and bolts of English grammar. (Please note, if you are a UK teacher, our course English Grammar for Teachers will be more suitable for you.) The course has already attracted over 3,000 participants from 156 countries. It discusses the following topics:
- The building blocks of English sentences: word classes, phrases and clauses
- Grammatical functions and semantic roles
- Using words and phrases to build clauses
- Talking about time: tense and aspect
- Talking about what is possible, probable and necessary: mood and modality
- How to communicate effectively: presenting information
Teaching English Grammar in Context is a follow-on course for our FutureLearn course English Grammar for Teachers. It helps teachers to teach English grammar effectively and enjoyably using real texts, such as novels, poems and songs. On this five-week course, teachers will discover methods for teaching English grammar in context throughout primary and secondary education. With this approach, they can employ grammar in other aspects of their teaching for a more unified experience. This technique has also been shown to have positive impacts on students' creative writing and analytical reading.
English Grammar Day 2025
The tenth annual English Grammar Day will take place on 7 July 2025 in the British Library.
This public event is jointly organised by the Survey of English Usage, the University of Oxford and the British Library.
English Grammar Days are frequently fully booked and attract a great number of teachers and school children, as well as members of the public and the press. Booking is now open on the British Library website.
This year’s speakers will be
- Beth Malory (UCL)
- Zarah Shah (Author and KS4 Coordinator, @LitDriveUk) and Holly Wimbush (Head of English, NW Regional Lead, @LitDriveUK)
- Simon Horobin (Oxford)
- Sarah Kirk-Brown (British Library)
- Rob Drummond (Manchester Metropolitan University)
- Billy Clark (Northumbria University)
Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics 2025
This year's Summer School will take place from 25 to 27 June 2025.
Our online Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics takes place in a time slot designed to make it internationally inclusive from Europe to Asia. We cover grammar, discourse, corpus methodology and statistics in one unique three-day event.
Booking is now open!
Recent Publications
- Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research
- Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research
An original book on statistics for researchers in corpus linguistics, written by Sean Wallis. The book draws on decades of collaborative corpus linguistics research at the Survey with colleagues around the world, and ten years of independent research in statistics.
- Outlines and develops the ‘Survey Methodology’ in Corpus Linguistics
- Promotes a perspective of linguistics research driven by theoretical frameworks and analysis, not merely what the data allows us to see
- Explains statistical inference from first principles
- Argues for a focus on confidence intervals rather than ‘p values’ to understand your data, what you are testing, and what your results might mean
- Presents a series of novel statistical methods motivated by Corpus Linguistics analysis problems
- Shows how to reinstate logical reasoning into statistical claims
This book is written for researchers and students of linguistics from undergraduate level upwards.
- Handbook of English Linguistics
- The Handbook of English Linguistics (2nd Edition)
The second edition of the popular Handbook of English Linguistics brings together stimulating discussions of the core topics in English linguistics in a single, authoritative volume. Edited by Bas Aarts, Alice McMahon and Lars Hinrichs, the chapters cover syntax, methodology, phonetics and phonology, lexis and morphology, variation, stylistics, and discourse, and also provide discussions of theoretical and descriptive research in the field.
This revised edition:
- Presents thirty-two in-depth, yet accessible, chapters that discuss new research findings across the field, written by both established and emerging scholars from around the world
- Builds upon the very successful first edition, published in 2006
- Incorporates new trends in English linguistics, including digital research methods and theoretical advances in all subfields
- Suggests future research directions
This book is an essential reference work for researchers and students working in the field of English language and linguistics.
- Oxford Handbook of English Grammar
- Oxford Handbook of English Grammar
An authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Edited by Bas Aarts and Jill Bowie of the Survey of English Usage with Geri Popova of Goldsmiths, it contains 31 chapters by linguists from Aarts to Ziegler.
- Addresses foundational areas of research methodology
- Explores a range of theoretical approaches to English grammar
- Covers all the core subdomains of grammar, including morphology
- Examines the relationship between grammar and other areas of linguistics
- Explores grammatical variation across genres and dialects, and change over time
The handbook's wide-ranging coverage will appeal to researchers and students of English language and linguistics from undergraduate level upwards.
English Grammar for Schools Resources
We have published a set of Englicious grammar resources for teachers and children in UK primary and secondary schools.
Written by Bas Aarts and Ian Cushing, using simple language and practical examples, these classroom resources explain the key grammatical terms in the English National Curriculum that primary and secondary school teachers are expected to teach. Prices start from £4.95 for a knowledge organiser, with savings for bulk purchases.
The resources are a spin-off from our Teaching English Grammar in Schools project and are published by UCL Business. Income helps to support the Englicious project.
- For more information, for prices and how to order, click on the images above.
Free Grammar Resources for School Teachers — the Englicious Website
We run two courses for school teachers, in conjunction with the UCL Institute of Education, Grammar for Teachers and Teaching English Grammar in Context, both of which use Englicious.
In the following video, school teachers at St Aidan's Primary School, North London, talk about their experience using Englicious in the classroom.
Parsed Corpora of English
- The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) consists of 87,000 trees and 800,000 words of spoken English across the decades.
- Release 2 of The British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) is an upgrade of the popular 1 million-word ICE-GB corpus.
Both corpora are released with the latest ICECUP 3.1 software.