ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the corpus-based research in World English has gradually reached beyond simply exploring world Englishes (WE) using corpus data. It describes future directions for corpus-based approaches to WE and offer suggestions to ensure that corpus-based approaches continue to play an active role in WE research. The chapter presents a bird’s-eye view of the main corpora of WE that are available and explains how those corpora are structured as datasets, and also discusses the type of data they represent and how those corpora can help researchers address questions of a qualitative as well as a quantitative nature. As corpora became available and corpus-based WE research started to bloom, software was developed to facilitate the extraction and automatic handling of corpus data. The chapter explores the general stepping stones in the development of corpora of WE as well as key methodological tools and analytical approaches.
