Next ... / The next...

[Suaro]

Dear all,
I'm absolutely new to the Forum and actually registered because I sometimes have doubts as to meanings, ways to make things clearer to my students and things like that.
The question today is about the use of the article before "next". There is no problem about things like "next Monday", "next week" etc. and I know that expressions like "the next day/week ..." and "the following day/week ..." mean the day/week following another. You use these in sentences like "She said she was arriving the next week/the following day." and so on.
Now a Grammar book by Swan says that it is also possible to use "the next ..." meaning the day/week starting today. Along these lines, the book sugests examples like "The next week is going to be very busy", to mean this week starting today. How frequent is this use of "the next" in English?

[Mister Micawber]

Reasonably frequent. A good place to look for answers to this sort of thing is in a language corpus. I use COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) a lot. You can find it HERE.
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Native English teacher at Mister Micawber's

[Beeesneees]

Very frequent, and as you have read, very flexible. Even native speakers often have to seek clarity about which week is being discussed, as the two parties in the discussion may use it in different ways.
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Cheers m' dears!

[Mister Micawber]

And welcome to English-test, Suaro. Feel free to help us answer questions, too.
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Native English teacher at Mister Micawber's