Corpora and language learners (review)

The present volume reflects the growing interest in and significance of the use of computer corpora and corpus-linguistic methodology for the study of learner language and the teaching of languages and linguistics. It includes selected presentations given at the 5th Teaching and Language Corpora conference (TaLC) in Bertinoro, Italy, in 2002. The volume consists of an introduction by the three editors and thirteen papers that are grouped into thematic sections reflecting three macro-areas of interaction between language corpora and language learners: corpora by learners, corpora for learners, and corpora with learners. Two papers that can be considered reflections on current theory and technology open and close the volume (‘The textual priming of lexis’ by Michael Hoey and ‘Facilitating the compilation and dissemination of ad-hoc web corpora’ by William H. Fletcher). The book is rounded off by a subject index and a bionote section.

The section ‘Corpora by learners?’ contains six papers that constitute corpus-based studies into learner language, addressing mostly (lexico-)syntactic but also methodological issues: ‘Multiple comparisons of IL, L1 and TL corpora: The case of L2 acquisition of verb subcategorization patterns by Japanese learners of English’ by Yukio Tono, ‘New wine in old skins? A corpus investigation of L1 syntactic transfer in learner language’ by Lars Borin and Klas Prütz, ‘Demonstratives as anaphora markers in advanced learners’ English’ by Agnieszka Lenko-Szymanska, ‘How learner corpus analysis can contribute to language teaching: A study of support verb constructions’ by Nadja Nesselhauf, ‘The problem-solution pattern in apprentice vs. professional technical writing: An application of appraisal theory’ by Lynne Flowerdew, and finally ‘Using a corpus of children’s writing to test a solution to the sample size problem affecting type-token ratios’ by Ngoni Chipere, David Malvern, and Brian Richards.

The empirical findings obtained from (learner) corpus research provide a link to language teaching—not only as to which language structures and processes are typical of a certain situational use and are thus most likely to be encountered by language users/learners, and which therefore should explicitly be addressed in teaching (the question of ‘authentic input’)—but also as to which words and structures turn out to be problematic for language learners. ‘Corpora for learners?’ includes four papers that discuss the didactic use of corpus findings in the development of teaching materials and syllabus design: ‘Comparing real and ideal language learner input: The use of an EFL textbook corpus in corpus linguistics and language teaching’ by Ute Römer, ‘Can the L in TaLC stand for literature?’ by Bernhard Ket-temann and Georg Marko, ‘Speech corpora in the classroom’ by Anna Mauranen, and ‘Lost in parallel concordances’ by Ana Frankenberg-garcia.

Finally, ‘Corpora with learners?’ features three papers that address the interaction between corpora and their users, that is, the learners’ use of corpora in the classroom as a tool to find out about language themselves: ‘Examining native speakers’ and learners’ investigation of the same concordance data and its implications for classroom concordancing with ELF learners’ by Passapong Sripicharn, ‘Some lessons students learn: Self-discovery and corpora’ by Pascual Pérez-Paredes and Pascual Cantos-Gómez, and ‘Student use of large, annotated corpora to analyze syntactic variation’ by Mark Davies.

This volume brings together both empirical studies and papers that review current trends, theories, and methodology, and can thus be considered representative of the state of the art in this rapidly expanding field. It will be of particular interest to corpus linguists working on learner language, but also to (applied) linguists and second language acquisition researchers (and possibly also language teachers) who want to find out more about the application of computer corpora and corpus-linguistic methodology to...