What can a corpus tell us about language teaching?

Abstract

Opening with a general overview of the different ways in which the academic field of corpora and language teaching has been approached, this chapter reviews the literature in three areas related to the development of the field, with a special update on relevant research in the past decade. First, corpus methods in language teaching are concerned with what corpus linguistics concepts, tools and techniques are involved in or applied to language teaching. Second, corpus evidence as teaching materials focuses on indirect applications or use of corpora in producing teaching and research resources such as dictionaries, grammars, course books and study lists. Third, corpus tasks for language teaching involve the direct applications or use of corpora by teachers, as well as learners, for a range of pedagogical purposes. The chapter ends with a discussion of future directions and areas for further research and practice, summarising a number of current and concrete recommendations from recent studies for practitioners, language teachers and learners.