ABSTRACT
Corpora have long played an important role in the design of vocabulary teaching materials. This chapter discusses several key contributions corpora can make in this area and suggests practices and principles to help guide researchers and educational practitioners in the creation and evaluation of corpus-based materials. Section 1 looks at one of the most widespread uses of corpora in vocabulary teaching: the creation of wordlists. Section 2 then extends this to look at recent attempts to create pedagogical listings of formulaic language. Section 3 examines the contribution corpora of academic and disciplinary language can make in English for academic purposes (EAP) and English for specific academic purposes (ESAP) contexts. Section 4 provides an overview of existing vocabulary teaching materials based on corpora on EAP programmes. Section 5 describes and evaluates a corpus of science and engineering journal articles created to develop vocabulary teaching materials aimed at PhD students on an ESAP programme. Specific keywords were selected to develop a sample awareness-raising task focusing on constituency and positionality variation of concgrams.
