This paper considers the issue of the norm in the context of learner corpus research and its implications for foreign language teaching. It seeks to answer three main questions: Does learner corpus research require a native norm? What corpus-derived norms are available and how do we choose? What do we do with these norms in the classroom? The…

This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of…

Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately…

This replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough et al., 2019) that identified holds (i.e., temporary cessation of dynamic movement by the listener) as a reliable visual cue of non-understanding. Conversations between second language (L2) English speakers in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca…

Although there is a large and increasing body of research on the use of corpus data by language teachers and learners, the language teachers in question are also the researchers reporting on their use of corpora with their own learners. There is thus a gap, which this plenary speech addresses, between this research and the practice of language…

We propose five research tasks targeting grammar teaching and learning, focusing on extending previous research and exploring under-studied features and contexts. The first two tasks outline replications and extensions of seminal studies on pedagogical grammar, Toth (2008) and Samuda (2001), designed to advance our understanding of the teacher…

Business English and academic English may perhaps be thought of as areas of language use requiring precision of expression and a quest for specific and unambiguous meaning. However, corpus evidence shows that both types of language, in their spoken contexts, exhibit noticeable use of the kinds of vague expressions found in everyday conversation.…

The fear of technology replacing jobs can be traced back to Aristotle, who, before great technological advances existed, ventured that machines may one day end the need for human labor (Campa 2014). In the current era, there is overwhelming evidence of technological unemployment. This evidence comes in the form of jobs that were once common, but…

This paper reports on an approximate or partial replication of a study by Salsbury, Crossley & McNamara (2011) that examined the longitudinal developmental of a number of core lexical features related to word imageability, concreteness, familiarity, and meaningfulness in a spoken corpus of English second language (L2) learners. Salsbury et al.…

This timeline looks at explicit uses of corpora in foreign or second language (L2) teaching and learning, i.e. what happens when end-users explore corpus data, whether directly via concordancers or integrated into CALL programs, or indirectly with prepared printed materials. The underlying rationale is that such contact provides the massive…

This article updates the trends and developments of Japanese as a second language (JSL) research since Mori and Mori (2011) by reviewing nearly 200 selected empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2010 and early 2019. The first section of this review examines the cognitive aspects of second language (L2) Japanese development,…

Language description is a fundamental requirement for second language (L2) syllabus design. The greatest advances in language description in recent decades have been done with the help of electronic corpora. Such language description is the theme of this article. The article first introduces some basic concepts and principles in corpus research.…

Corpus linguistics has transformed the landscape of empirical research on languages in recent decades. The proliferation of corpus technology has enabled researchers worldwide to conduct research in their own geographical locations with few hindrances. It has become increasingly commonplace for researchers to compile their own corpora for specific…

Discourse studies is a vast, multidisciplinary, and rapidly expanding area of research, embracing a range of approaches including discourse analysis, corpus analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. Each approach offers its own unique perspective…

This plenary paper showcases current corpus-based research on written academic English, illustrating the tight links that exist between corpus research and pedagogic applications. I first explicate Sinclair's concept of the "lexical approach", which underpins much corpus research and pedagogy. I then discuss studies which focus on…