ABSTRACT
A frequently heard complaint these days is that people do not read enough anymore. Usually it is suggested that this is down to the internet and the multitude of electronic distractions around us. However, the complaint seems paradoxical when one considers that there is certainly more to read readily available to us now than at any point in history. The internet could be viewed as one giant corpus that draws its texts globally from just about every genre imaginable (and quite a few that are beyond that!). It is also multi-modal in that it contains countless videos and recordings. People have begun to find ways of harnessing some of this information. Friedman (2008), for example, reports on getting his Japanese learners of English to use the internet as a lexical database, allowing them to find examples of target language in context. The other way of looking at this is that anyone who has learnt how to negotiate the internet to find the information they want has in effect gained skills in negotiating what might be the largest corpus of them all.
