Corpora In Applied Linguistics

This book explores corpus linguistics in language learning and research.

This volume explores the opportunities that spoken corpora offer and the challenges of research with such corpora. The use and applications of spoken corpora are discussed from the perspective of both language analysis and language pedagogy. Twelve chapters written by corpus linguists analyse an extensive number of spoken corpora based on the oral production of speakers as varied as language learners, users of English as Lingua Franca, native speakers, or speakers of English in academic contexts. This book also highlights the growing emphasis on the use of corpus-based research by examining the implications of corpus findings in educational settings.

This volume brings together contributions from the Klagenfurt Conference of Corpus-Based Applied Linguistics (CALK14), in order to extend corpus linguistic research in different areas of applied linguistics. The studies gathered here explore the opportunities that both spoken and written corpora offer for answering questions in different domains of applied linguistics such as second language learning, language testing, comparative linguistics, learner pragmatics and specialised discourses. At the same time, the contributions also give insight into possible limitations and further challenges of corpus-based research in these areas.

Demonstrates the importance of corpus research to applied linguistics, covering a range of areas.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

Corpora and Language Education critically examines key concepts and issues in corpus linguistics, with a particular focus on the expanding interdisciplinary nature of the field and the role that written and spoken corpora now play in the fields of professional communication, teacher education, translation studies, lexicography, literature, critical discourse analysis, and forensic linguistics. The book also presents a series of corpus-based case studies illustrating central themes and best practices in the field.

This volume comprises nine contributions that were written by up-and-coming corpus-based researchers with varied areas of expertise, who were all disciples of Douglas Biber sometime in the past two decades. These papers cover a wide variety of linguistic analyses and describe the principles of the Flagstaff school: a careful procedure for language corpora collection with special consideration for corpus size, representativeness, sampling and systematic analysis; the use of computer programming abilities that allow the posing of corpus-based research questions never asked before; and a strong emphasis on the combination of quantitative methods based on sound and innovative statistical procedures complemented with comprehensive qualitative functional analyses of the language. This volume has been edited in honor of Douglas Biber, a pioneer of the American school of corpus-based research.