While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of…

One of the most promising avenues of research in computer-assisted language learning is the potential for language learners to make use of language corpora. However, using a corpus requires use of a corpus tool as an interface, typically a concordancer. How such a tool can be made most accessible to learners is an important issue. Specifically,…