CorpusMate

CorpusMate is the latest free, open-access corpus tool available on the web. It hails from the University of Queensland, which was recently recognised as the leading university in Australia. It was designed by Dr. Peter Crosthwaite and programmed by Dr. Vít Baisa. I should say here and now that Vít is also the programmer of SkELL and my VersaText, and I had lunch with Pete on his campus in June as we had only met online up to that point.
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Its clear and simple interface allows you to search for a word or phrase in its 50 million word corpus. You can focus your search in one of 20 topics such as biology, law, education and journalism. And you can also limit your search to spoken or written language. While it does not have a collocation tool, it does have a patterns tool: the search result is sorted according to the frequencies of patterns. The numbers on the right indicate how many instances there are. 

Clicking on the little arrows on the right shows the patterns.

These are the 11 instances of the first pattern. This one happens to show hyponyms of intervention.

The single page About page provides some background to the corpus, the sources of data, and most importantly, help on performing queries.
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Last year I wrote a workbook, Discovering Academic English, that was used by about 500 students in an MA TESOL program. They learnt a lot of academic language and a lot about learning language through COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), but COCA was a steep learning curve for them and no matter how detailed the instructions were or how focussed the tasks were, many of the students found COCA difficult. They were frustrated by the limited number of daily searches and by frequently being taken to an invitation to pay.  This was not the experience I wanted them to have. 

In the workbook I am writing now, the students will work with CorpusMate instead of COCA. CorpusMate has a much smaller corpus and fewer tools, which make it easier to use and easier to find results. I am hoping that students will warm to corpus use through the new guided discovery tasks. The searches are easy to perform and the results are clearly displayed. The aim is to promote their learning of academic English and their academic English!