The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (4-7 July 2004 Granada, Spain) and reflect the latest developments that have taken place in the field of the teaching applications of text corpora, with a special emphasis on their use in the foreign language classroom.
The book is divided into three main sections. The first section sets the scene for what this collection of essays aims to be. It deals with the issue of what corpus linguistics can do not only for the understanding of the nature of language itself but also for so fundamental and miraculous a matter such as language learning and language acquisition. The second section tackles the issues of corpus design and corpus exploitation and provides the reader with a great variety of evidence in favour of corpora exploitation for the building of a successful teaching environment. The final section deals with practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom. Although each of the papers here reports particular experiences in very different teaching and learning contexts, as a whole they show that corpora can be used on the spot in a language teaching context by teachers and learners without extensive training in computational tools, and studies of linguistics features can be tailored to specific pedagogic context and learning requirements.
The book represents a solid contribution to linguistic studies and language teaching and it is a good example of the diversity of the scientific lines in which corpus linguistics is involved at the present moment.