Corpora in the classroom

Within corpus-aided language pedagogy, a distinction can be made between uses of corpora as sources of descriptive insights relevant to language teaching/learning, and uses of corpora that directly affect the learning and teaching process(es). This chapter, which is concerned with the second of these two aspects, retraces the development of data-driven/discovery learning approaches, presents their rationale and describes some relevant corpus typologies and applications, with special reference to the fields of LSP and translation teaching. It suggests that the challenge for corpus-aided discovery learning, now that corpus construction and access have become easier, is to make sure that these powerful tools and methodologies find a role in the language classroom – for communicative reasoning-gap activities, strategic and serendipitous learning as well as reference purposes – as central as that they have already secured in other areas of applied linguistics.