From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching

A book which promises us a pathway from the corpus to the classroom? Hadn't John Higgins and Tim Johns shown us some of the tools we could use back in 1984 (Higgins and Johns 1984), and hadn't Tim then gone on to give us the basic guidelines on how to get there (Johns 1986)? After the pedagogic ground had been broken by these pioneers, the leading lights in the field, like the late John Sinclair, then offered us the vision of a corpus in every classroom (Sinclair 1991), and others followed. Glyn Jones and I had a go at getting everybody concordancing in the classroom seventeen years ago (Tribble and Jones 1990), Mike Scott gave us WordSmith Tools (Scott 1996), and Mike Barlow developed Monoconc (Barlow 1996). It looked as if we had the means and the motivation to dig ever deeper into the rich seams of meaning which ran through the huge collections of language in use which were becoming ever more easily available. But here we are in 2008, and we still appear to need a book to help us to get from the corpus to the classroom.