About Englicious

What is Englicious?

Englicious will help students:

Englicious offers teachers:

How can I access Englicious?

How do I find and use Englicious materials?

    The Englicious team:

    Englicious is brought to you by the Survey of English Usage, a world-leading research unit at University College London, independently ranked as one of the world’s leading universities, and is part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Economic and Physical Sciences Research Council. We also received support from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL and from UCL Business PLC.

    The team members are Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and Luke Pearce. Former team members are Ian Cushing, Ellen Smith-Dennis, Dan Clayton, Jill Bowie, and Seth Mehl. Artwork is courtesy of Spike Gerrell, and copyright for this is held by him. The new 'beta' web-design is by Silverdistrict.

    What do teachers say about Englicious? Watch this video.

    More videos: Englicious YouTube Channel

    Comments and feedback

    Registered users can leave comments or suggestions on pages, add questions to a forum, or contact us using the form on the website.

    Englicious is a community-driven project. Feedback from teachers is particularly welcome and helps us improve the site.

    Finding and using materials

    Searching in the Resources window

    New, only in Beta mode!

    Englicious has a new powerful search screen. Click on the Resources button at the top of the page to see it.

    • Resources are listed down the left hand side.
    • Click on a resource to see a preview. This is shown in the middle.
    • Search controls are on the right of the screen. These include
      • Search box: type search word(s) and hit Enter
      • Level: select key stage and year
      • Language in Use: select language topic
      • Grammar: select grammar term
      • Content type: select resource type – see below
    Lessonsnoun phrase

    Current tags

    Every restriction you specify is shown as a 'tag' at the top of the display. The list of resources are filtered by these tags.

    Click on the tag, clear the search or menu to remove the filter.

    The page should update automatically (if your internet connection is slow, please be patient).

    Browsing resources

    Change the sequence order with the 'sort by' control. Scroll down to see more resources. Englicious loads new resources to the bottom of the page automatically.

    Finding materials by level

    • Click on 'Level' in the blue menu to the left. The menu will expand to show 'Primary' and 'Secondary'
    • Select 'Primary' or 'Secondary'. All primary or secondary resources will be displayed on your screen, and the menu will expand further to show Key Stages.
    • Select a Key Stage. All materials for that key stage will be listed on your screen, and the menu will expand further to show year levels. 
    • Select a year level.

    Finding materials by topic

    • Click on the 'Language in use' or 'Grammar' menu to the left. The menus will expand to show lists of topics.
    • Select a topic. All materials related to that topic will be displayed on your screen. Where applicable, the menus will expand further to show sub-menus.

    Browsing by content type

    • Click on the 'Content type' menu to the left. The menu will expand to show a list of content types.
    • Select a content type. All materials from the selected content type will be displayed on your screen.
    • Content types, which are colour-coded, are as follows:
      •  Starters: bite-sized activities for classroom use, many requiring only 5 minutes or less
      •  Lessons: full classroom lessons and supporting materials
      •  Assessments: interactive exercises for practice and assessment
      •  Projects: larger resources for investigative language projects that might span across multiple days
      •  Professional development: resources to support teachers
      •  NC Specifications: the new National Curriculum specifications (in an easily searchable form)
      •  Videos: short instructional videos for a general audience
    • In this menu you will also find the Glossary, which is a complete glossary including both the non-statutory 2014 National Curriculum definitions of terms and a number of other useful terms.

    Finding materials by level, topic and type

    • Click on a filter box to select a category from the 'Level', 'Language in use', 'Grammar', or 'Content type' menus. Filter boxes appear down the right-hand side of those menus, and they look a bit like this:  
    • Click on multiple filter boxes to select multiple categories, and then press the button. Materials will be displayed that match the filter boxes you've selected.
    • Englicious remembers the search you last performed, so you can easily amend it.
    • Note: Ticked items in the same menu are added together with "or" (e.g. find resources marked for either "Year 2" or "Year 3"). Ticked items in different menus are combined with "and" (e.g. resources marked for both "Year 2" and the language topic "Vocabulary").

    Content types

    Content types, which are colour-coded, are as follows:

    •  Starters: bite-sized activities for classroom use, many requiring only 5 minutes or less
    •  Lessons: full classroom lessons and supporting materials
    •  Assessments: interactive exercises for practice and assessment
    •  Projects: larger resources for investigative language projects that might span across multiple days
    •  Professional development: resources to support teachers
    •  NC Specifications: the new National Curriculum specifications (in an easily searchable form)
    •  Videos: short instructional videos for a general audience

    Using Classroom Materials

    Getting help

    How to get help

    Englicious contains a lot of information that we hope will be helpful to teachers.

    There are also many additional explanatory pages found under the Content type menu on the left.

    Resources and Reading

    Blogs

    Grammarianism - A Blog for Teachers of English (Bas Aarts)

    Slang Lexicographer - A Blog about Slang (Jonathon Green)

    Separated by a Common Language - Observations on British and American English by an American Linguist in the UK (Lynne Murphy)

    The Language Log - A General Blog about Language (Various authors)

    Language: A Feminist Guide (Deborah Cameron)

    Lingua Franca - Language and Writing in Academe (Various authors)

    Johnson - Language Column at the Economist (Robert Lane Greene)

    EngLangBlog - A Blog for A-Level English Language Students and Teachers (Dan Clayton)

    Teaching resources

    English Language Teaching Resources Archive at Queen Mary, University of London

    A-level English Language Resources at Lancaster University

    Sounds Familiar at the British Library

    Corpus For Learning resources

    Dictionaries

    Aarts, B., S. Chalker and E. Weiner (2014) (2nd edition) Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Crystal, D. (2008) (6th edition) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Crystal, D. (2006) Words, Words, Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Leech, G. (2006) A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Leech, G., B. Cruickshank and R. Ivanic (2001) (2nd edition) An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage. London: Longman.

    Peters, P. (2013) The Cambridge Dictionary of English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Swan, M. (2005) (3rd edition) Practical English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Trask, R. L. (1999) (2nd edition) Language: The Basics. London: Routledge.

    Trask, R. L. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar. London: Penguin.

    Trask, R. L. (2007) (2nd edition) Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge (ed. Peter Stockwell).

    Encyclopedias

    Asher, R. E. (ed.) (1993) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

    Bright, W. (ed.) (1992) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Brown, K. (ed.) (2006) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier.

    Collinge, N. E. (ed.) (1989) An Encyclopedia of Language. London: Routledge.

    Crystal, D. (2010) (3rd edition) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Crystal, D. (2003) (2nd edition) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    McArthur, T., J. Lam-McArthur and L. Fontaine (eds.) (2018) (2nd edition) The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    McArthur, T. (ed.) (2005) The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language (with Roshan McArthur). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Grammars and other books on the English language

    Aarts, B. (2011) Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Aarts, B. (2011) English Grammar: All You Need to Know. (This is a concise version of the item above, available on Amazon only.)

    Aarts, F. and J. Aarts (1982) English Syntactic Structures: Functions and Categories in Sentence Analysis. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

    Aarts, B., A. McMahon and L. Hinrichs (eds.)(2021)(second edition) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Hoboken NJ and Chichester: Wiley Publishers.

    Aarts, B., J. Bowie and G. Popova (eds.) (2020) The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

    Biber, D., S. Conrad and G. Leech (2002) Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

    Crystal, D. (2006) The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate Shot and Left. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

    Crystal, D. (2017) Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar. London: Profile Books.

    Culpeper, J., F. Katamba, P. Kerswill, R. Wodak and T. McEnery (2018) (eds) (2nd edition) English Language: Description, Variation and Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

    Greenbaum, S. and R. Quirk (1990) A Student’s Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. (This is a condensed version of Quirk et al. 1985.)

    Huddleston, R. (1984) Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum et al. (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum (2022) (2nd edition) A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This book is based on Huddleston and Pullum et al. 2002.)

    Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

    About ICEBox

    ICEBoxTraditional grammars have relied on ‘made-up’ examples. Englicious is different.

    Instead of example sentences like

    we have examples like

    Our examples come from natural language corpora. They have been spoken or written by real people. Grammar is the study of the structure of actual English or it is nothing!

    Often examples are selected and presented in real time using our ICEBox database technology. This technology is also part of our ICECUP software supplied to academic linguists.

    You can see this in operation. If you reload this page you will see different examples.

    The advantages are immediately apparent. Most obviously, we can obtain as many ‘real’ examples as we like to aid classroom discussion. Let's look at some examples.

    Dynamic examples

    Note: Codes of the form [S1A-001 #1] specify the text (S1A-001) and sentence unit (#1) in ICE-GB. Spoken texts have codes starting with S, while written texts have codes starting with W.

    We also use examples in some dynamic exercises, so you can also have as many revision exercises as you like.

    Why real language is beneficial for teaching

    Grammatical concepts can seem very abstract. Stereotypical examples of nouns (cat, mat, etc.) are not much help to students when real uses may be ‘messy’ and far from stereotypical, as we have seen.

    This observation informs our approach. We believe it is necessary for students to apply grammatical concepts to real sentences in order to learn them properly. Thankfully, thanks to our corpus resources we have very many real sentences to use.

    Ultimately we want students to be able to apply what they have learned to their own language, not just stereotypical sentences they never say or write!

    Why is real language not always helpful?

    That said, there are many times when simply taking random examples of real language is not ideal for teaching purposes. Examples may be too complex or contain words that are inappropriate, particularly for younger children. And teachers often want to focus on simple structures for sound pedagogical reasons.

    So in fact, Englicious contains a variety of types of example.

    Privacy Notice

    This is the privacy notice for the Englicious website.

    It explains in plain English what data we collect on registered users and the lawful purposes we use this data for.

    It also explains what you can do if at any time you are unhappy with how we process your data.

    A separate page explains about Cookies, which are small bits of data used as part of the interface to Englicious to make it work.

    User data is different from cookies. User data is personal data as defined in European law, and we are obliged to process it accordingly.

    The data we collect

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    Englicious does use some cookies. However we do not use them for advertising purposes. We use them for the following reasons.

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