This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. Its specific focus is on best practices identified in the exploitation of these resources in landmark impact initiatives across different parts of the globe. The development of increasingly accessible digital corpora has coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collection, encoding and archiving of ‘Big Data’. Less attention has been paid to the importance of developing standards for enriching and preserving other types of corpus data, such as that which captures the nuances of regional dialects, for example. This book takes these best practices another step forward by addressing innovative methods for enhancing and exploiting specialized corpora so that they become accessible to wider audiences beyond the academy.

Corpus-aided language pedagogy is one of the central application areas of corpus methodologies, and a test bed for theories of language and learning. This volume provides an overview of current trends, offering methodological and theoretical position statements along with results from empirical studies. The relationship between corpora and learning is examined from complementary perspectives — the study of learner language, the didactic use of corpus findings, and the interaction between corpora and their users. Reflections on current theory and technology open and close the volume.With its focus on the learner and the learning setting, Corpora and Language Learners is addressed to corpus linguists with an interest in learner language, applied linguists wishing to expand their understanding of corpora and their pedagogic potential, and language teachers wishing to critically assess the relevance of work in this field. This volume grew out of selected presentations at the 5th Teaching and Language Corpora conference in Bertinoro, Italy.

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.

This volume presents highlights of the first ICAME conference held in the southern hemisphere, in papers on new kinds of corpora for business and communications technology, as well as those comprising computer-mediated communication and college newspapers. The latter yield lively insights into the digitized discourse of younger adults and non-professional writers -- speech communities that have been underrepresented in the standard English corpora. Other groups that are newly represented in research reported in this volume are bilingual users of English in Singapore, Hong Kong and China, as corpus data is brought to bear on second-language speech and writing. The proposed corpus of spoken Dutch profiled here will support research into its variation in different genres and contexts of use in the Netherlands and in Belgium. Research on new historical corpora from C15 to C18 is also reported, along with techniques for normalizing prestandardized English for computerized searching. Meanwhile papers on contemporary usage show some of the continual interplay between British and American English, in grammar and details of the lexicon that are important for English language teachers.

The contributions in this volume provide a kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexicogrammar. Central issues are the presentation of major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), the findings (especially about frequency) which are simply not accessible without such resources, their theoretical implications relating to both lexical units and word meanings, and the practical – especially pedagogical – applications of corpus findings. This is complemented by a lexicographer’s view on the data structures implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The volume, which has sprung from the 36th ICAME conference, held in at Trier University in May 2015, will be of relevance for theoretical and applied linguists interested in corpora, word usage, and the mental lexicon.

This book takes stock of current research into computer learner corpora conducted both by ELT and SLA specialists. It should be of particular interest to researchers looking to assess its relevance to SLA theory and ELT practice. Throughout the volume, emphasis is also placed on practical, methodological aspects of computer learner corpus research, in particular the contribution of technology to the research process. The advantages and disadvantages of automated and semi-automated approaches are analyzed, the capabilities of linguistic software tools investigated, the corpora (and compilation processes) described in detail. In this way, an important function of the volume is to give practical insight to researchers who may be considering compiling a corpus of learner data or embarking on learner corpus research.The volume is divided into three main sections: • Section 1 gives a general overview of learner corpus research; • Section 2 illustrates a range of corpus-based approaches to interlanguage analysis; • Section 3 demonstrates the direct pedagogical relevance of learner corpus work.