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Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning
Edited by Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska and Alex Boulton
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 69] 2015
► pp. 37–62

Teaching and language corpora

Perspectives from a personal journey

| King’s College London

Starting with an account of the author’s experience of corpus applications in language teaching from the mid 1970s through to 2014, this chapter traces the transformation of corpus analysis from its origins on mainframe computers in university departments to the present day – where personal computers are used in research, materials development and DDL. Following this retrospective narrative, the results from a series of surveys of classroom applications of corpus analysis are presented. These findings address questions such as: Who is using corpora in language teaching, and in what contexts? What tools and resources are they using? What published resources do teachers find most useful? And what benefits do teachers feel arise from using corpora and corpus tools in language education?

Keywords: concordancing, DDL, history, survey
Published online: 13 May 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.69.03tri
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