ABSTRACT
The field of corpus linguistics emerged around the same time as second language acquisition (SLA) when computers became more accessible. Thus, while SLA research has valued the contribution of corpus data, corpora have played a more marginal role in examining second language knowledge and use. Corpus linguists also began to realize that they could expand the range of possible analyses if they could annotate corpora in ways that reflected our theoretical understanding of language. Over the last few decades, the tools that have been developed by corpus linguists and natural language processing researchers have become quite sophisticated and are now able to analyze corpora containing billions of words. Early learner corpus studies were met with skepticism by many SLA researchers for other reasons than divergences in opinion about what can be considered as ‘good data’. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts in this book.
