ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss some fundamental questions which have arisen in the course of the development of a new degree scheme at Lancaster University which started in 1993. The introduction of corpora has brought with it far-reaching changes in the method of teaching and the method of learning. As more corpora become available, the amount of information grows and the proportion of the whole which can be mastered by a single person diminishes. When new technology becomes available for teaching, it is perhaps natural to start thinking of what the teacher can do with it. However, the technology does not of itself provide a goal. Gobbets and corpora both have problems with regard to the generalizations to be made, but they are of different kinds. The use of gobbets relies on the teacher’s judgement, e.g. that the study of a passage of Elyot leads to useful conclusions about sixteenth-century English as a whole.
