After decades of being overlooked, corpus evidence is becoming an important component of the teaching and learning of languages. Above all, the profession needs guidance in the practicalities of using corpora, interpreting the results and applying them to the problems and opportunities of the classroom. This book is intensely practical, written mainly by a new generation of language teachers who are acknowledged experts in central aspects of the discipline. It offers advice on what to do in the classroom, how to cope with teachers' queries about language, what corpora to use including learner corpora and spoken corpora and how to handle the variability of language; it reports on some current research and explains how the access software is constructed, including an opportunity for the practitioner to write small but useful programs; and it takes a look into the future of corpora in language teaching.

Table of contents

List of contributors vii Introduction John McH. Sinclair 1–10 The corpus and the teacher In the classroom 13 In the classroom: Corpora in the classroom: An overview and some reflections on future developments Silvia Bernardini 15–36 In preparation: What teachers have always wanted to know — and how corpora can help Amy B.M. Tsui 39–61 Resources — Corpora Corpus variety: Corpus linguistics, language variation, and language teaching Susan Conrad 67–85 Spoken - general: Spoken corpus for an ordinary learner Anna Mauranen 89–105 Spoken - an example: The use of concordancing in the teaching of Portuguese Luísa Alice Santos Pereira 109–122 Learner corpora: Learner corpora and their potential for language teaching Nadja Nesselhauf 125–152 Research Composition: The use of adverbial connectors in Hungarian university students’ argumentative essays Gyula Tankó 157–181 Textbooks: A corpus-driven approach to modal auxiliaries and their didactics Ute Römer 185–199 Resources — Computing Basic processing: Software for corpus access and analysis Michael Barlow 205–221 Programming: Simple Perl programming for corpus work Pernilla Danielsson 225–246 Network: Learner oral corpora and network - based language teaching: Scope and foundations Pascual Pérez-Paredes 249–268 Prospects New evidence, new priorities, new attitudes John McH. Sinclair 271–299 Notes on contributors 301 Index 305