ABSTRACT
The proliferation of text in electronic form on disk, CD-ROM and over computer networks, and of software to access it rapidly, offers teachers and learners an enormous range of material which might be used for language-learning purposes. This chapter aims to investigate the implications of different theoretical assumptions, stressing the way in which one particular feature of corpus use — its potential for retrieving multiple texts or contexts of a given type — appears particularly relevant in the light of current theory. It outlines some activities where newspaper corpora serve as sources of multiple texts and contexts, permitting discourse participation and observation, and allowing inference from the latter of declarative information that can be related to occasions of procedural use. Perhaps the most obvious pedagogic use of corpora is to treat them as sources of classroom materials which the teacher can select from and adapt according to requirements.
