Corpus-aided language pedagogy is one of the central application areas of corpus methodologies, and a test bed for theories of language and learning. This volume provides an overview of current trends, offering methodological and theoretical position statements along with results from empirical studies. The relationship between corpora and learning is examined from complementary perspectives — the study of learner language, the didactic use of corpus findings, and the interaction between corpora and their users. Reflections on current theory and technology open and close the volume.With its focus on the learner and the learning setting, Corpora and Language Learners is addressed to corpus linguists with an interest in learner language, applied linguists wishing to expand their understanding of corpora and their pedagogic potential, and language teachers wishing to critically assess the relevance of work in this field. This volume grew out of selected presentations at the 5th Teaching and Language Corpora conference in Bertinoro, Italy.

While native corpora and corpus linguistic tools and methods have been used and applied for quite some time in the development of learning and teaching materials, learner corpora are only just beginning to impact the field of language teaching, testing and assessment. This volume helps to close this still existing gap and highlights the great potential of learner corpus research for language pedagogy by presenting a selection of 11 original studies on learner corpora, conducted by established experts as well as by excellent young researchers. The papers included in the volume present new corpora and methods; studies on written as well as spoken learner corpora and on using data-driven learning scenarios in the classroom. All papers include sections on practical and concrete language-pedagogical applications. This volume will be of significant interest to researchers working in corpus linguistics, learner corpus research, second language acquisition and English for Academic and Specific Purposes, as well to language teachers and materials developers.

The goal of this book is to make the ideas of corpus linguistics accessible to teachers and, most important, provide ideas, instruction, and opportunities for teachers to use the applications of corpus linguistics in their classrooms. Using Corpora in the Language Learning Classroom is intended for graduate students who are studying applied linguistics or TESOL, for teacher-trainers working with language instructors, and for practicing language teachers who want to better understand corpus linguistics and how to incorporate it into their classroom. The book has three sections: (1) a general introduction to corpus linguistics, which contains a brief look at the theory and principles of corpus linguistics; (2) a section that reviews corpus-influenced materials and commonly used corpora; and (3) a set of corpus-designed activities that rely on several tools (MICASE, COCA, TextSTAT, for example) to teach a variety of language skills. This book does not intend to provide a complete theoretical foundation for corpus linguistics, but it does aim to provide its readers with the basic theoretical underpinnings and tools needed to work with corpora in the classroom in such a way that they are able to more effectively and efficiently help students to acquire a second language.

This book provides an up-to-date snapshot of recent research and developments in the use of corpora for language learning and teaching. It is divided into three parts. Part I focusses on innovative uses of corpora by language teachers and learners. These cover the world's first corpus-based TV program for the teaching of English conversation, as well as corpus-based approaches to the teaching of EAP, cultural studies and translation. Part II focuses on new corpus-based tools for LSP learning. Part III illustrates research findings from corpora consisting of language learner data and discusses their implications for language teaching and learning. It will appeal to scholars in both language teaching and learning and corpus and computational linguistics.

In over 30 years of data-driven learning (DDL) research, there has been a growing sophistication in the ways we collect, analyse, and put corpus data to use. This volume takes a three-fold perspective on DDL. It first looks at DDL and its role in informing language learning theory and how it might shed light on the language development process; secondly it addresses how DDL can help us characterise learner language and inform teaching accordingly, and thirdly it showcases practical applications for the use of DDL in classrooms. The contributors to this volume examine a variety of instructional settings and languages across the world. They reflect on theoretical, methodological and classroom implications using both novel and established language learning theories, natural language processing (NLP), longitudinal research designs, and a variety of language learning targets. The present volume is an invitation from some of the leading researchers in DDL to reflect on the research avenues that will define the field in the coming years.

Articles in this volume discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled.

This book investigates the effects of corpus work on the process of foreign language learning in ESP settings. It suggests that observing learners at work with corpus data can stimulate discussion and re-thinking of the pedagogical implications of both the theoretical and empirical aspects of corpus linguistics. The ideas presented here are developed from the Data-Driven Learning approach introduced by Tim Johns in the early nineties. The experience of watching students perform corpus analysis provides the basis for the two main observations in the book: a) corpus work provides students with a useful source of information about ESP language features, b) the process of "search-and-discovery" implied in the method of corpus analysis may facilitate language learning and promote autonomy in learning language use. The discussion is carried out on the basis of a series of corpus-based "explorations" by students and provides suggestions for developing new tasks and tools for language learners.

The aim of this volume is to highlight the benefits and potential of using learner corpora for the testing and assessment of L2 proficiency in both speaking and writing, reflecting the growing importance of learner corpora in applied linguistics and second language acquisition research. Identifying several desiderata for future research and practice, the volume presents a selection of original studies, covering a variety of different languages. It features studies that present very thoroughly compiled new corpus resources which are tailor-made and ready for analysis in LTA, new tools for the automatic assessment of proficiency levels, and new methods of (self-)assessment with the help of learner corpora. Other studies suggest innovative research methodologies of how proficiency can be operationalized through learner corpus data. The volume is of particular interest to researchers in (applied) corpus linguistics, learner corpus research, language testing and assessment, as well as for materials developers and language teachers.

In recent years, corpora have found their way into language instruction, albeit often indirectly, through their role in syllabus and course design and in the production of teaching materials and other resources. An alternative and more innovative use is for teachers and students alike to explore corpus data directly as part of the learning process. This volume addresses this latter application of corpora by providing research insights firmly based in the classroom context and reporting on several state-of-the-art projects around the world where learners have direct access to corpus resources and tools and utilize them to improve their control of the language systems and skills or their professional expertise as translators. Its aim is to present recent advances in data-driven learning, addressing issues involving different types of corpora, for different learner profiles, in different ways for different purposes, and using a variety of different research methodologies and perspectives.