 But before I get to the main point of the presentation, could I ask you to look at this group of words? You might have seen something similar before. So if you have, could I ask you not to spoil the fun for the other people? Because I know there are some people involved in corpus linguistics here, so I'm pretty sure you've seen something similar before. There are 10 most popular words in English. If you put them together, they make up well over 20% of the vocabulary used by the average speaker of English, native speaker of English. They're over 20%, 24 to be precise. And the question is, which out of those, out of those 10 words is the most popular word in English? The most popular word in English, the most common, okay? Could you throw a few answers at me? Yeah, okay. And that, mm-hmm. More ideas? I. I, okay. That. Yeah, it's a lot of people say that. How popular do you think it is, percentage-wise? How popular? How popular? Would it be 5% of all the words that we used? 15? 15? No. Mm-hmm. 30, 40? Uh-huh. Do you have any more guesses? 25. Actually, it's around 6%. And that's, that's a lot. So in practice, in practice, it means it's every, around approximately every 14th word that we say is that. Okay? What would be the second one? I'm not going to ask you about all of them, but let's do one more. The second one. Would you stick to the other ideas? I, or I? Some people said, or would you change your mind now? Yeah, I need to change it. Oh. And again, how popular is it, do you think? Is it anywhere close to that, to the number that, to those 6%, or is it much lower, would you say? 50%. Mm-hmm. 50%. It's 3, actually. So it's 50% of the top one. Okay? But that's close. Of course. Uh-huh. 3%. Mm-hmm. I suppose, um, saying that there's also an, and knowing that an is the fifth most popular word in English. Um, that could be a nice starter activity for a lesson where we have to teach articles, for instance. Because it proves to our students that, that, um, the definite article there, the definite article there, they are extremely, uh, popular. And, and that's why it's important to get them right. And how do we know those things? How do we know that that is the most popular, followed by all? Because someone must have counted those words. Six years ago, it was Michael West and his researchers who would do that. I suppose you wouldn't really envy them for, for that type of job. Um, and especially knowing that a few decades later, computers would be able to do that in a very efficient, much more efficient way, and providing much more reliable data. And how do we do that? How do we check those things using computers? Let's have a look at one of the websites. British National Corpus, BNC. As you can see, it's a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English. So why don't we type in there and see what we get? 100 million words. Okay. It's almost there. How many? 6,055,159. In a corpus of 100 million words. So as we said before, just over 6%. Mm-hmm. Um, that's right. And here are the numbers for the remaining eight words. As you can see, I is the last one there. So it's not that popular. And it's the third one. Island is in the BNC almost, is mentioned almost 10,000 times. And what about limerick? Would you be able to guess? Eight. That's quite a lot, isn't it? Okay. So all of those words, you remember them, all of those words were so-called functional words. Okay. Those 10 words, they don't really have any proper meaning. They perform some function in the language. Here, what I've done here with the Lohmann corpus of English, I removed all the other, all functional words from the list and they just left out so-called literal words. So words which have some meaning. Okay. And this is what we've got. One said no time only, other two now very first. As you can see, quite a few numbers there. And the point you think, how would financial language, business-related language be different from that list? Can I give you 30 seconds and then I will ask you to give me the top three words in business, financial corpus of English. Okay. How will it be different? Or maybe it will be the same? 30 seconds? Okay. 30 seconds. 40 seconds. Okay. Okay. 30 seconds. Okay. Okay. Okay. 40 seconds. Okay. Okay. Okay. 30 seconds. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And then, so that's all we have to do here, Okay, alright, but I get a few ideas. I heard money there. People usually say money, okay. What else do you think will be there? Economy? Economy, okay. Dead, okay. Alright, these days of course, crisis. It's interesting that we actually don't have money in this book. There's no money. But money is there. Money is in the top 20, yes, but a bit later. Percent, split in two different ways. Here market last new, one company bank, government and group. Do they have a lot in common? Not really. Which is great to see because then, of course, it proves that teaching business English is completely different than teaching general English. Perhaps some other conclusions could be drawn. For instance, looking at number nine, it's its government. And of course, when you think about it, it makes sense, doesn't it? The word of finance is tightly connected with the word of politics. But if you think about it, have you ever seen a business English course book where there would be a lesson about or unit devoted to vocabulary connected with politics, government? As far as I can remember, I haven't seen anything like that. So analyzing language corporate is great for vocabulary, for those numbers, for collocations, colligations, and of course, for linkers. When we teach linking words, linking phrases, of course, we need to provide a lot of context. Why don't we have a look at some other software there? Word Smith. Some of you might be familiar with this one. One of the tools is this concordant, sir. Which linky word is problematic for our students? Would you say although is difficult to get? Okay. So we choose to use the Longman corpus of English and the word is already there, although. Let's have a quick look. Of course, it's not that fast, as you can see, but we don't really have to have all of those example sentences there. So why don't we stop it now? A thousand, almost a thousand, of course we'll do. And you see the whole point is to be able to provide quickly real life example sentences. What often happens, especially if we do a bit of opportunistic teaching, we might not really have enough good examples at hand, if you know what I mean, right? If our students ask us for some good examples of how to use, let's say, although, or just ask, how do I use although? We might not really be able to provide enough good examples just like that. And of course, it takes only a few seconds to get so many of them. And what is great, of course, we are able to provide even more context. Another one, for instance, however. Okay, just a few will do. And however, it's relatively easy, I suppose. When we teach however, we don't want to say that it's always followed by a comma. That is what we would say. But actually, when we look at some of those example sentences, you can see that some of them are not really followed by a comma. Can you see any examples of those? What would be those examples that you have followed? So followed by modal verbs, followed by adjectives, followed by adverbs. And what's interesting is also to notice that very often, however, actually finishes a sentence. Do we have any examples of that there? Or however is followed by a dot? Do we have any of those there? Do students see examples like that? They are surprised, right? Because books normally wouldn't really teach those extra uses of however. One second. And some drama now. I suppose you would agree that especially with higher levels, students often question what you say. For instance, when teaching the future perfect, they would say, Okay, I agree. Of course, it is in the course book, but no one really uses it in real life. Do they say that? They say that we teach them something which is not really practical. The formula is will plus have plus the past participle form of the verb. And then, of course, we would give them examples like that. Books would give them similar examples. But it's still just us telling them, giving them some sentences that we've just created for them. It's not really a real life language, is it? Why don't we go to Google Scholar, for instance? We wouldn't really want to use regular Google because it's not that reliable. But Google Scholar, of course, is. And see how many hits, how many results we get. Do you think there will be a lot? 12,500. That's quite a substantial number considering that it's Google Scholar. It's, of course, much smaller than regular Google. What we could even do, that's very important, I forgot to mention. We need to include that string of words in between inverted commas because otherwise we will get completely different results. You can do the same using some of the biggest newspapers. Like, for instance, the New York Times. You can do the same with the Irish Times. You can do the same with the Times. The only difference is that the New York Times gives you the actual number. And I've already done that for you. What I've done is there, as you can see, almost a half million times. And if you want to do a bit of research like that, some useful websites there. And if you find something interesting, don't hesitate to email me, okay? Thank you.