Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching

Applied corpus linguistics now has a considerable history, going back at least as far as the paper by Jones and Sinclair (1974) which proposed, on the basis of scrutiny of a relatively small corpus of 147,000 words (Hoey 2005: 4), that in the study of collocation the researcher should focus primarily on the span four words either side of the node (or search word). Hence one would hope that great benefits to the ELT profession could now be described. Yet two sobering assertions are made near the beginning of this edited collection of papers in the Continuum ‘Corpus and Discourse’ series. Ädel's Chapter 3 on corpora and academic writing includes (p. 40) a quotation from Granger (2004) that ‘the number of concrete corpus-informed achievements is not proportional to the number of publications advocating the use of corpora to inform pedagogical practice’. This observation goes hand in hand with similar sentiments expressed by Römer (p. 18), who is ‘hesitant to say that corpora and corpus tools have … fully “arrived” on the pedagogical landscape’. The reader is thus eager to discover what progress is currently being made to remedy these perceived shortcomings.