ABSTRACT
In spite of multiple reviews of textbooks, publishers have not recognized the necessity of providing learners with authentic pragmatic input. Thus, materials development in pragmatics falls to teachers and programs. As free-online language corpora become increasingly accessible, they offer an excellent source of authentic conversational interaction on which to base pragmatics pedagogy.
This chapter discusses materials development using corpora, reviews instructional effects studies using corpora in various ways, including the development of materials and corpus searches by learners, and provides readers information on choosing and using a corpus for specific students and their goals. The chapter also tackles some of the limitations of corpora for pragmatics materials development. Corpus searches are particularly well-suited to lexical searches, which means that both illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) and pragmatic routines can be easily searched. However, speech acts are much more difficult to search unless one has a pragmatically tagged corpus. We make an argument for both teacher-developed materials using the most accessible tools and publisher-funded materials development using more time-intensive techniques for commercial resources. We conclude with a discussion of areas for further research that engage areas of particular challenge that have been identified in the chapter.
