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RCPCE Profession-specific Corpora The collection of RCPCE profession-specific corpora is developed by the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE), Department of English and Communication of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It contains real-life texts, discourses and genres collected from different professional communities and contexts in Hong Kong. It also contains two corpora of research/journal articles published in high impact journals of up to 39 disciplines. Professionals, researchers, teachers, students and other language users can leverage these language resources to enhance their language proficiency and professional communicative competencies. Click here for the list of publications by users of RCPCE Profession-specific Corpora. If there are questions, please email engl.rcpce[at]polyu.edu.hk. The computer software used to search the corpora is ConcGramOnline© designed and written by Chris Greaves. A newer revision was developed by RCPCE in early 2019 for searching across multiple sub-corpora. You can search for a word, or a phrase, or an additional word or phrase in combination with your search word or phrase, and find examples of contextual use in concordances. In addition to the software ConcGramOnline©, the centre developed a part-of-speech tag search software in 2017. Our corpora were tagged with Penn Treebank part-of-speech tag set by Stanford POS Tagger. The search engine can search for any n-grams and skipgrams with a specific part-of-speech in a corpus. Click here for tutorial on how to use the ConcGramOnline© Click here for tutorial on how to use the part-of-speech search
Learning English with RCPCE Profession-specific CorporaDr Sal Consoli, prepared a number of worksheets that target secondary school leavers and university students in the first year who wish to practise their English skills for academic purposes. These worksheets may be used by teachers and students alike. The design of these worksheets encourages users to engage with a range of corpora from RCPCE Profession-specific Corpora through various tasks which, in turn, stimulate the enhancement of several academic skills (e.g., group work, first author writing, vocabulary building). Click below links to download these worksheets.
*Dr Sal Consoli was a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Communication of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also a member of RCPCE.
Concgrams, ConcGram© and ConcGramCorePlease click here to learn more about concgramming, the ConcGram software or to download a free copy of ConcGramCore software that can search concgrams in your corpus automatically.
Children's Literature in English Language Teaching for Primary Students in Hong Kong (CLELT)We have developed lesson plans and teaching materials for ten picture books featured below. English teachers are invited to download these materials and lesson plans for their classes. For more information about the project, please feel free to read the news on PULSE@PolyU page. Please contact engl.rcpce[at]polyu.edu.hk and request a password to unzip the password-protected items and access the video interviews with authors. Visit CLELT website for the teaching materials for primary school students.
Surprise-Words Analysis Tool (SWAT)This tool was developed by Paul Baker in 2026. A surprise word is a word whose collocates markedly diverge when compared across two corpora. The tool compares the words across two corpora and ranks them in order of the extent to which their collocates differ. Like the keywords technique, it can be used as a “way in” to a corpus, although instead of identifying difference in relative frequencies, it identifies difference in word use or meaning. The tool is free to use. For more information or to cite the tool, please refer to the following Open Access article:
Baker, P. (2026) Surprise Words and Core Words: Collocational Divergence Across Corpora. Applied Corpus Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2026.100220
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