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The Survey of English Usage

The Survey of English Usage is an internationally-renowned Corpus Linguistics research group based in the English Department.

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.

About the Survey, filed slips

About the Survey

Read about the Survey, its history and famous alumni.

Research Projects

Research Projects

Information about our past and current research projects.

Research Resources

Research Resources

Browse and download free research resources from the Survey of English Usage.

Software Sales

Software Sales

Find out about the ICE-GB and DCPSE corpora available to purchase from the Survey.

Events (the Foster Court clock)

Events and Seminars

Read about linguistics research seminars organised by the Survey of English Usage.

Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics (online)

Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics

Now open for booking for 25-27 June 2025: our Summer School is a three-day online course in the fundamentals of Corpus Linguistics.

The English Grammar Day (facsimile of cover of Grammar Land by M.L. Nesbit)

The English Grammar Day

Now open for booking: The ‘English Grammar Day’ is an annual public discussion on English grammar and its role in the school curriculum. The next English Grammar Day will be held on 5 July 2025 at the British Library, London.

Short Courses for School Teachers

Short Courses for School Teachers

Find out about the half-day online courses in teaching English Grammar that we organise for school teachers.

Survey Archives

Survey Archives

Read the Survey of English Usage’s annual reports, bibliography and other documents.

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

Bas Aarts and Luke Pearce have created two new courses on the FutureLearn platform.

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)

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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 (book cover)
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 ‘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 (book cover)
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 (book cover)
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

    English Grammar Knowledge OrganiserEnglish Grammar FlashcardsEnglish Grammar Posters

    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 are pleased to see our Englicious website going from strength to strength, with more teachers signing up every day. Englicious (www.englicious.org) is an online resource for improving the teaching of English grammar and literacy in UK schools. Our site uses the latest UK National Curriculum grammar terminology and spans both the primary and secondary sectors.

    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.

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    Parsed Corpora of English

    The ICE-GB Corpus
    Two major parsed corpora of British English are available to order from the Survey of English Usage.

    • 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.