The Cambridge International Corpus (CIC) is a collection of over 800 million words of real spoken and written English . The texts are stored in a database that can be searched to see how English is used. The CIC also contains the Cambridge Learner Corpus, a unique collection of over 60,000 exam papers from Cambridge ESOL. It shows real mistakes students make and highlights the parts of English which cause problems for students.
The Cambridge International Corpus is used to inform Cambridge University Press English Language Teaching publications as well as for research in corpus linguistics. Access is currently restricted to authors and researchers working on projects and publications for Cambridge University Press, and researchers at Cambridge English Language Assessment.[1]
It contains instances of modern written English, taken from newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, emails, textbooks, websites, and many other sources. Its spoken data is taken from many sources, including everyday conversations, telephone calls, radio broadcasts, presentations, speeches, meetings, TV programmes and lectures.