Learning with corpora

Language corpora - collections of texts in electronic form, which can be analysed using concordancing software - have come to represent one of the major resources in descriptive and applied linguistics today. This volume investigates their potential as tools for foreign language teaching, illustrating how corpora can empower learners by providing sources of knowledge about a language and the culture, support for reading and writing tasks, practice to develop specific skills, and opportunities for written and spoken communications, both in the classroom and in the self-access centre. Drawing on their experience as teachers and learners at Bologna University’s School for interpreters and traslators in Forlì, the authors examine a wide variety of uses of different corpora in the light of current theories of language learning, and highlights ways of training learners to exploit corpora effectively and autinomously.