A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and brought together so that language can be studied on the computer. Today, corpus linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language, and the impact of this dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making itself felt in many areas of language study. In this volume, a selection of leading experts in various key areas of corpus construction offer advice in a readable and largely non-technical style to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well designed and fit for the intended purpose. This guide is aimed at those who are at some stage of building a linguistic corpus. Little or no knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational procedures is assumed, although it is hoped that more advanced users will find the guidelines here useful. It is also aimed at those who are not building a corpus, but who need to know something about the issues involved in the design of corpora in order to choose between available resources and to help draw conclusions from their studies.

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.

Academic Writing with Corpora offers a step-by-step accessible guide to using concordancers and aims to help introduce data-driven learning into the academic English classroom. Addressing the challenges faced by EAP teachers when explaining to their students how to write 'naturally', this book provides a solution to the problem by placing an emphasis on learning from expert and proficient writing. In doing so, it: takes a highly practical approach; uses Lextutor, an easy-to-use, open access concordancer, whilst introducing students to tools, such as SkELL, MICUSP and BNC-English Corpora; fosters autonomous learning by demonstrating how to solve everyday difficulties in word choice and grammar; helps teachers to use corpora in teaching proficient writing and helps students to improve their academic writing by learning from the best examples in their field; guides students towards better awareness of the communicative side of academic writing. This book forms essential reading for all students on academic writing and EAP courses or who wish to improve their writing.

This book discusses key issues of corpus linguistics like the definition of the corpus, primary features of a corpus, and utilization and limitations of corpora. It presents a unique classification scheme of language corpora to show how they can be studied from the perspective of genre, nature, text type, purpose, and application. A reference to parallel translation corpus is mandatory in the discussion of corpus generation, which the authors thoroughly address here, with a focus on Indian language corpora and English. Web-text corpus, a new development in corpus linguistics, is also discussed with elaborate reference to Indian web text corpora. The book also presents a short history of corpus generation and provides scenarios before and after the advent of computer-generated digital corpora. This book has several important features: it discusses many technical issues of the field in a lucid manner; contains extensive new diagrams and charts for easy comprehension; and presents discussions in simplified English to cater to the needs of non-native English readers. This is an important resource authored by academics who have many years of experience teaching and researching corpus linguistics. Its focus on Indian languages and on English corpora makes it applicable to students of graduate and postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, computational linguistics and language processing in South Asia and across countries where English is spoken as a first or second language.

During the last four decades, a corpus-based approach to language teaching has become very significant. Direct use of corpora in language pedagogy is limited by certain factors: time, the lecturer’s knowledge and skills needed to analyze the corpus, access to sources such as computers and appropriate computer tools, or a combination of these factors. The key to a successful corpus-based approach is in the appropriate level of the lecturer’s guidance or pedagogical mediation, which depends on student age, experience, and prior knowledge. It is therefore very important that lecturers be equipped with the necessary knowledge and education for using and analyzing corpora on a daily basis. Computer Corpora and Open Source Software for Language Learning: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a cutting-edge research publication that analyzes teacher experiences in implementing computer corpora into their language learning classrooms in order to formulate additional insights as to best strategies for integrating such tools that maximizes language learning efficiency in primary and secondary education. Highlighting topics such as ICT tools, language education, and linguistics, this book is ideal for academicians, educators, computer science teachers, IT professionals, researchers, and students.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

The history of modern European languages has been largely determined by the range of functions they have acquired, particularly after 1500. This development necessitated a notable expansion of their syntax and lexis, but is most characteristically reflected in the conventionalization of text types. Starting from the German concept of Textsorte as developed from the 1960s onwards, the present account is a first comprehensive attempt at charting the field for the history and present-day situation of the English language. In text types, a designation is linked with a more or less stable form which guides the writer’s production as well as the reader's expectation, permitting one to recognize straightforward uses as well as deliberate misuses. Some two thousand of such designations are here listed with minimal definitions and dates for first occurrences. The discussion then concentrates on selected types, which are seen as especially illustrative for English: book dedications, cooking recipes, advertisements, church hymns, lexical entries, and jokes. Their functions and development over time are treated in correlation with their specific linguistic characteristics and adaptations to different period styles and social changes in the readership. The functional range of text types in traditions outside England and the consequences of the export of English categories are exemplified by the history of Scots/Scottish English and of English in India. The arguments are accompanied by a lavish supply of textual excerpts and more than fifty pages of facsimiles, which are especially relevant for insights derived from typographical features. A full bibliography and indices are provided at the end. The book will prove useful for decisions on the constitution of representative text corpora and stimulate research into a greater number of individual text types as well as contrastive analyses at least among European languages.

Corpora are well-established as a resource for language research; they are now also increasingly being used for teaching purposes. This book is the first of its kind to deal explicitly and in a wide-ranging way with the use of corpora in teaching. It contains an extensive collection of articles by corpus linguists and practising teachers, covering not only the use of data to inform and create teaching materials but also the direct exploitation of corpora by students, both in the study of linguistics in general and in the acquisition of proficiency in individual languages, including English, Welsh, German, French and Italian. In addition, the book offers practical information on the sources of corpora and concordances, including those suitable for work on non-roman scripts such as Greek and Cyrillic.

This collection showcases the latest innovations in research on the application of corpora and corpus-based methods in ESP/EAP writing instruction and the many ways in which corpora can be successfully and practically integrated in ESP/EAP programmes. While previous work has discussed the successful use of corpora in teaching writing in the areas of ESP/EAP, this book is the first of its kind to bring the most up-to-date research on the topic together in one place. The volume’s unique structure mirrors the key stages of the writing instruction process, from preparation to exploitation to analysis. The book begins by showing how corpora can be used to prepare materials, moving into an exploration of how students in ESP/EAP programmes use corpora in practice, before bringing the discussion full circle to the ways in which corpus-based approaches might be implemented to analyse ESP/EAP student writing. This approach presents readers with insights into how corpora can be effectively integrated into ESP/EAP writing instruction at every step of the process and opens the way for future areas of study. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in applied corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, and English for Academic Purposes, as well as active practitioners in ESP/EAP writing instruction.