Corpora and Language Teachers:

Corpora and Language Teachers:
From Ready-Made to Teacher-Made Collections

Krajka, Jarosław (2007) Corpora and Language Teachers: From Ready-Made to Teacher-Made Collections.

JKrajka.pdf

Abstract. The prevalence of computers, increased opportunities of Internet access, availability of
large amounts of target language data, all of these call for language teachers’ greater interest in the
active use of corpora both for the classroom (in materials development) and in the classroom (for
learner discovery tasks). Contrary to the pre-Internet era, when corpus consultation procedures
were largely restricted to linguists and lexicographers due to technological, financial and logistical
considerations, the language  teachers of the Web 2.0 age  will  find it  much easier to access,
compile and consult corpora for language teaching. 
  The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview of available corpus resources, proceeding
from ready-made corpora to be consulted on the Internet by teachers of English, French and
German, through the approach and tools for using the Web as a Corpus (WaC), finally proceeding
to the compilation of custom-made (“ad-hoc”) corpus collections to suit the needs of particular
teaching contexts. The paper concludes with a comparative review of a few widely available
concordancers to be used with teacher-made corpora.