Alex Boulton

Classroom applications of corpus analysis

Corpus linguistics is almost by definition applied linguistics, as was tacitly acknowledged when the American Association of Applied Corpus Linguistics (AAACL) dropped its third A in 2008. Its methodologies can be applied far beyond the discipline itself (cf. McEnery et al., 2006: 8), not least in language teaching and learning, where its influence has been of three main types. The first lies in improved descriptions of language varieties and features which can inform aspects of the language to be taught; the second makes corpora and tools for analysing them available to the teacher; the third puts them directly into the learners hands. We begin this chapter with an overview of all three types before concentrating mainly on the third type in the final sections, since other chapters in this volume deal in more detail with corpora and vocabulary, lexicography and phraseology, pedagogical materials and translation.