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Introduction

the first generation of corpus linguists, who were hovering around retirement.
The book was thus designed round seven papers from scholars with rising rep-
utations, which were commissioned in advance of the course. I provided the
overall design and a paper based on my contribution to the course.
The course was a popular and lively event, and the participants were invited
to submit papers to join the commissioned ones. There was a good response,
from which another four papers were chosen to give some representation to
current research in Europe. Several of the papers were completed shortly after
the course, and so make only passing reference to very recent publications
see particularly my comments below on Nadja Nesselhauf s survey of learner
corpora. Short bionotes on each of the participants can be found at the end
of the book.

Design and content

The book begins with two papers that have the teaching process at the centre.
Silvia Bernardini opens with an overview on the use of corpora in the class-
room that highlights the pedagogic approaches rather than the data knocking
at the door. She points out that after a quiet start the variety and energy of
current work is impressive, and she goes on to set out her own approach,
which points towards the future. It is a kind of discovery learning, harnessing
powerful tools and resources as supports to the student.
While reviewing the whole field of corpus-oriented methods, Silvias paper
turns on more than one occasion to actual language data and the language
users response to it; this firmness of reference is characteristic of work in
corpus linguistics, and will be found in several of the other papers.
Silvia is not only concerned with turning out students with an excellent
command of English; many of them are destined to become professional trans-
lators, and so the development of problem-solving skills in an information-rich
society has a special relevance to them, while being a fundamental resource for
any language user.
The second paper concerns, as its title makes clear, What teachers have
always wanted to know and how corpora can help. It is written by Amy
Tsui, and it tells of a remarkable corpus-centred facility that has been made for
the English teachers of Hong Kong. Most of the teachers there are native Can-
tonese speakers and have been trained locally; on the other hand the position of
Hong Kong in the international trading community sets very high operational
standards for English. The teachers feelings of insecurity are shared in chat
rooms, the language problems are assessed by an expert team under Amys di-
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John Sinclair

rection, with reference to substantial corpus resources. Most of the queries are
not unique to a single teacher, but recur frequently, and so they are posted in a
growing database of immense value to the teaching community.
This pioneering work has been developing for almost a decade now, and is
mature and well-established. As well as illustrating the kind of support that
a community of language teachers needs and deserves, it also is a first re-
minder that well-distributed languages like English acquire a local flavour,
setting tricky problems for teachers searching for appropriate models.
The second section of the book focusses on corpora themselves. As the
primary source of data for this kind of language teaching, the way they are
designed is of central importance.
There is nowadays a wide variety of corpora available, and also corpora
which show variety within a single collection. This second kind of corpus al-
lows researcher, teacher, student or any combination of these to explore the
way in which language users make particular selections for particular occa-
sions and particular tasks. Appropriacy of language to the purpose has always
been an enduring problem for language learners, and Susan Conrad reviews
the contribution that corpora can make in this important area.
She points out forcibly that attention to variation cannot be ignored in
language learning, and it is not confined to specialised varieties, but pervades
the central area of language use. This point is illustrated with an example that
demonstrates that our received view of language use is not consistent with ob-
servation, and that the intuitions we have even those of a native speaker
need to be complemented by corpus evidence.
Looking ahead to the section on computing which follows, Susan then de-
scribes a software tool that is capable of assessing several variables at the same
time, thus giving substance to the notion of language variety.
Since the very beginning of corpus linguistics (Krishnamurthy 2004
(1970)), collections of spoken language especially impromptu conversa-
tions have exercised a particular fascination for researchers. They seem to
catch the language off its guard, so to speak, and show its workings in a way
that is often disguised in the blandness of writing. When computer typesetting
became possible, there was an explosion of data from the printing industry that
overwhelmed the relatively small collections of spoken language. Because there
is as yet no chance of automatic transcription of ordinary conversations, there
is a laborious and expensive process of transcription to be done, and that re-
duces the speech event into a written record of it, losing crucial information
about the stressing, intonation, pausing and general delivery.
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Introduction

Despite this, and with promise of technical improvements on the way, re-
cent years have seen a resurgence of interest in spoken corpora, and this is
celebrated by Anna Mauranen in the next contribution to the corpus section.
In a thoughtful state-of-the-art paper she considers the place and value of spo-
ken corpora in the language teaching/learning process. This raises issues like
authenticity, still a controversial topic in the classroom, and Anna takes a bal-
anced attitude to it, joining other contributors to this volume in pointing out
that corpus data is certainly superior to invented or adapted data. She stresses
that some orientation is required for both student and teacher if they are to
make the best use of corpora, and avoid the pitfalls of a procedure that is more
complicated than it looks. Looking ahead, she points out that the prolifera-
tion of corpora will gradually displace the native speaker from central position
as model and adjudicator of a language in use, and offer alternatives such as
expert non-native speakers.
As an example of a large and recently-established spoken corpus, and what
can be done with it, the next paper, by Lusa Alice Santos Pereira describes
resource-building at the University of Lisbon, and some possibilities envis-
aged for applications such as language teaching. Portuguese is one of the most
widespread languages of the world, with the fifth largest group of native speak-
ers, and to make a reference corpus of it is a major task. Luisas group, the Cen-
tro de Lingustica da Universidade de Lisboa, has been accumulating resources
for some years, and makes them available to the profession. One of their most
impressive publications is a set of 4 CD-ROMs containing large samples of spo-
ken Portuguese from the many countries where this language is in daily use.
The samples are cleverly presented, with sound and transcript aligned.
Luisa gives several clear examples of the kind of information that is only
obtainable from a corpus, and which is of great value to language learners and
teachers, as well as to other professional users of language data. The differ-
ing frequencies of forms and lemmas is one important area for an inflected
language, and the collocation profiles of near-synonyms are directly useful in
the classroom. Her paper is full of information about the corpora and gives
valuable addresses and links.
Finally in the corpus section Nadja Nesselhauf reviews the state of play
in the making of corpora which are specially designed for research into lan-
guage learning the learner corpora. This initiative grew naturally from the
large collections of learners errors collected in several centres, and, led by the
University of Louvain-la-neuve in Belgium has flowered into a many-faceted
movement, collecting specimens of the language of learners with all sorts of
language backgrounds. Nadja covers the whole world in her survey, showing