Research in Corpora in Language Teaching and Learning

A corpus is simply a large collection of texts, typically nowadays stored on a computer. Rundell M. and Stock P. used the memorable phrase the “corpus revolution” to refer to the impact that corpora had had-;;and still have-;;on lexicography and lexicology. Grammar materials reflect the corpus insights incorporated into grammar reference works, principally the distinction between spoken and written grammar, along with a move towards blurring the distinction between grammar and lexis. An important spin-off from the lexicographical research of the 1980s and 1990s was the move towards bringing corpus information into learners’ materials. Lexical research into corpora had thrown up information revealing the phrasal nature of large swathes of the vocabulary of English, including fossilized chunks, phrasal verbs and idioms, and collocations. Nonetheless, Granger S. has noted a tendency for researchers in the fields of Second Language Acquisition and foreign language teaching to maintain “a certain distance”.