ABSTRACT
Since the advent of the development of corpora, followed by the rapid expansion and availability of collections from a range of contexts, there has been a growth in research, and consequently, our understanding of the nature of how spoken and written language is used. In parallel, there has been a notable interest and growth in the application of such corpus resources, tools, and methodologies in the language classroom, in either mediated (for example, in corpus-based textbooks) or direct ways (through the use of data-driven learning (DDL)). These applications vary in pedagogic nature, and also in terms of student language learning anticipated outcomes, for example, the use of corpus resources to improve fluency, lexical acquisition, grammatical accuracy, text structure, and appropriate genre and register use. This chapter will provide a brief overview of the classroom application studies of corpus approaches and DDL methodologies. It will then examine the perspectives of the main participants in these pedagogic contexts, the learners and the teachers, in terms of associated affordances and constraints. The reported studies suggest that most success has been seen at tertiary levels for a number of context-specific reasons. An original case study from the secondary school context in Norway highlights some of the persistent challenges associated with integration at this level. In contrast, corpus linguistics in the university-level teacher education context will be discussed as a critical change agent. Through these discussions, the chapter will attempt to understand and account for the levels of application of corpus approaches in the English language classroom. Finally, there will be a discussion of possible future research directions.
