ABSTRACT
Corpora have been at the forefront of two of the most significant changes in language education in recent years. On one hand, they have provided teachers and materials designers with more robust descriptions of how language is patterned and used, revealing the pervasive occurrence of phrasal units as the basis of idiomatic language use. On the other hand, they have facilitated new teaching methodologies, contributing to a wider shift from teaching as imparting knowledge to teaching as mediating learning. Here, corpora provide a means for students to take a more active and reflective part in their learning by exploring authentic examples of language. In the last decade, then, we have seen corpora exploited in areas as diverse as syllabus design (Walsh, 2010), classroom methodologies (Chambers, 2010), student grammars (Conrad & Biber, 2009) and assessment (Barker, 2010) in what has been something of a revolution in attitudes to language teaching. In this chapter, I survey the key changes that corpora have brought to language education, concluding with an example of an online concordancer for students. First, however, I offer a basic primer on what corpora are and how they are used.
