ABSTRACT
Corpora (principled collections of spoken and written text, stored in electronic form) have had an impact on language teaching for some time through the incorporation of computer tools, techniques, theoretical constructs, and research findings from corpus linguistic research (Berber Sardinha, 2013; Berber Sardinha et al., 2013; O'Keeffe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007; Reppen, 2010). Among the contributions that corpus linguists have made to the development of our knowledge about how language operates in reality (rather than how we imagine it does), two are particularly important: the notion that language use operates based on individuals employing words in generally predictable sequences (which largely forms the basis of John Sinclair’s linguistics) and the notion that language use is inherently variable and modeled by the situations in which individuals speak and write (which generally underlies the work of Douglas Biber). Although different thinkers have proposed such ideas over the years, Sinclair and Biber have provided the necessary evidence that each of these ideas reflects reality and, more importantly, have demonstrated the extent of the systematicity of these notions.
