ABSTRACT
In the 1980s and early 1990s corpus-based research centred on the exploration of lexical, grammatical, or lexico-grammatical items in what were considered at the time to be large-scale generalised corpora, such as the one-millionword Brown and LOB corpora (see Meijs, 1988; Kennedy, 1991) or the 7.3million-word Cobuild corpus (see R enouf and Sinclair, 1991; Sinclair, 1987, 1991), whose exploitation has resulted in a myriad of pedagogic materials for English for General Purposes, such as dictionaries, grammars, and coursebooks. Corpora have also long played a role in other aspects of language studies such as historical linguistics, dialectology, and variation studies (cf. McEnery and Wilson, 1996, ch. 4, for an overview of o ther uses of corpora). More recendy, the use of corpora has also been proposed for the raising of grammar awareness in teacher education program mes (Hunston, 1995) and taught as an academic subject as part of a degree program m e (Hatzidaki, 1996; Renouf, 1997). A nother area which is receiving increasing attention is the use of multi lingual parallel corpora for translation purposes (King, 1997; Barlow, 1996). Thus, since the early 1990s this burgeoning field has had an im pact on o ther areas in linguistics and language studies and has also expanded considerably regarding the size and types of corpora being compiled and the uses to which these corpora are put. Recent conferences such as the TALC’98, Teaching and Language C orpora Conference (h ttp ://users.ox.ac.uk/~talc98). TALC2000 (http ://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/talc2000), PALC’97, Practical Applications in Language Corpora, PALC’99, the two N orth American symposia on corpora in linguistics and language teaching (https://www.lsa.umich. ed u /e li/m ic ase / symposium.html'). the first taking place in 1999 and the second in 2000, bear witness to the growing interest in the application of corpus linguistics to lan guage teaching. The edited conference proceedings for TALC’98 are reported in Burnard and McEnery (2000), PALC’97 in Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Melia (1997), PALC’99 in Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Melia (2000), and the First N orth American Symposium on Linguistics and Language Teaching in Simpson and Swales (in press). A discussion list on corpus linguistics and language teaching has also recently been created (for details
see https://w w w .ruf.rice.edu/~barlow /cllt.htm D . which is yet another sign of the increasingly im portant role that corpus linguistics is now playing in lan guage pedagogy.
