Corpora: Formal Spoken English

[ramesh at clg.bham.ac.uk]

I'm certain there are corpora of European Parliament debates
and question-answer sessions, in English and other EU languages.
If you look at the ELRA catalogue http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html
I'm sure you will find some.

Concordances were used as part of the supporting tools in the EU-funded
SELECT project which I worked on at the University of Wolverhampton:
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/select/

Tim Johns at Birmingham University has done considerable work in the
use of concordances for teaching in general:
http://web.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/
and for English for Academic Purposes in particular:
http://web.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/timeap3.htm

Chris Tribble has also done a lot of work in this field, but I'm
sorry I don't have his details to hand (apologies, Chris!).

Best
Ramesh

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Honorary Research Fellow, Corpus Research Group, University of Birmingham
Research Fellow, University of Wolverhampton

P.S. COBUILD published some Concordance Samplers for use in teaching
a few years ago. Unfortunately, I think these may now be out of print,
but you may be able to get a copy by contacting COBUILD directly.
Workbooks to accompany many COBUILD publications may also contain some
concordance-based exercises. The COBUILD website has a concordance-based
competition, and among the subscribers to CobuildDirect, there may be some
teachers who use concordances in their exercise materials...