How can corpora be used in teacher education?

Having moved beyond the important but limited use of corpora for language research and the development of reference materials, many in the language teaching profession have been busy investigating, discussing, designing and evaluating ways in which corpus techniques may be used with learners in both direct and mediated ways. All of these very worthy endeavours have placed applied linguists and language teachers in a very privileged position, with an array of corpus-based teaching and reference materials, on-line resources, and an extended repertoire of approaches that can be employed in the classroom. It is possible, and relatively easy, to prepare an English language class exclusively based on findings from corpus research, using corpus-based dictionary, grammar and course-book material, preparing some frequency, keyword or concordance lists in advance, and even getting students to do some exploring using any number of available on-line corpora, or indeed any of those purchased by institutions using more specialised software available to them in computer labs. While such activities and developments have been enhancing language teaching to various degrees, the same cannot be said of the integration and use of corpus linguistics (CL) in language teacher education (LTE).