This summer, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Prof. Simone Vieira Resende at the 19th Summer Vacations Conference in São Paulo. The general theme of the 2-day conference was: The Teaching of Languages in today’s world: contexts and goals.
After some technical problems with the video recording session, Professor Resende welcomed the attendees and teased us by offering to sell a language immediacy pill. 
What students want for their New Year’s Resolution regarding language learning is to take a pill and after the first session, be fluent in whatever language they want to study.
So… here’s a sort of a pill:
What is Corpus Linguistics?
Corpus linguistics – takes off from the language – actual languages – and concentrates the ingredients (formula) into a palatable series of examples within contexts.
Corpus Linguistics allows for:
Choice of words you want to use
Collecting and analysis of corpus
Corpora – authentic data as they are – without manipulation to adapt the language 
Standardising of language / padronização linguística
Contextualization x register – where ? who ? when ?
Occurrence x Co-occurrence x Recurrence – how often does it appear in the text ?
Prescriptivist x descriptivist ? The corpus may be descriptivist – by just revealing how words are used – but also it can be prescripvist by defining which words are best used in what context.
“I’m interested … in…” – also the corpus shows that the best preposition in this case is “IN” not WITH or ON or AT, for instance. 
Use of concordance – leading to a conclusion
You should go. – inferring from examples
“When the economy improves all the boats start rising up…
all rise in court movie scenes “
Developing corpora in song lyrics
Webster’s the making of dictionaries prof.john Whitlam
BYU list of corpora developer corpus.byu.edu/corpora.asp
The Americanoid Blog 