ReCALL special issue: Researching uses of corpora for language teaching and learning Editorial Researching uses of corpora for language teaching and learning

Corpora, in a broad sense, have had a role to play in language teaching and learning for many decades.Of note are Thorndike and Lorge's Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words (1944), West's General Service List (1953), or Gougenheim (e.g., 1958) and colleagues' work on the Français Fondamental, but these mostly involved indirect applications, especially identifying frequent items (forms, meanings and uses) for inclusion in syllabuses and language programmes.Such work continues in lexicography, largely thanks to the pioneering Cobuild work led by the late John Sinclair (1987) (almost all major dictionaries, grammar books and manuals today are corpus-based to some extent, for major world languages at least), not to mention the proliferation of frequency lists (e.g., the series of Routledge Frequency Dictionaries 1 ) and various academic research projects, from Coxhead's Academic Word List (2000) to Martinez and Schmitt's (2012) Phrasal Expressions List, as corpora have much to tell us not just about 'usage' but also about collocations, multi-word units and 'chunking ' (e.g., McCarthy, 2004).Obviously these applications were indebted to lexicographical work carried out by linguists with an interest in what we call today corpus linguistics.However, a separate current emerged in the 1980s where language teachers, often close to a research team working with corpus data, saw a connection between research and teaching and began tentatively to explore how corpora could be of more direct benefit to their learners.Such applications are closely associated with the work of the late Tim Johns, but the first academic publication seems to be from McKay (1980) in San Francisco, whose students 1