Written language corpora and pedagogical applications

As acquiring competence in writing is a major part of the language learning and teaching environment, and as corpora provide access to increasingly vast collections of written texts, it is not surprising that the potential of using corpus data in this context is being investigated by researchers and teachers alike. Academic writing, in particular, has been the focus of attention of many researchers, most notably Swales (1990, 2004) and Hyland (2002, 2008). It is clear that the relevance of this type of research is to a large extent rooted in the need for students and academics to write and publish in a language which is not their native language, which in the vast majority of cases is English. This type of research and practice is thus based on the concept of genre. This is no doubt one of the reasons why researchers are increasingly focusing on the role of corpus data in their disciplines, and why the potential of using corpus data in teaching writing skills (Lee and Swales 2006) is being investigated.