Corpora for University Language Teachers

This volume is made up of 17 chapters which have developed out of papers and workshop sessions presented at the event entitled Corpora: Seminar and Workshops , held at the University of Padua, March 29-31, 2007. It maintains the straightforward, practical approach which characterized that event, meant as an introduction to the use of corpora even for novices. At the same time it goes into a wide range of different applications for corpora in language teaching and language research in higher education. One of these involves the creation and use of learner corpora. Another application involves corpus-assisted research into political discourse in the media. Language for special purposes is also focussed on as a research topic, an academic discipline, and language to be translated. Multimodal corpora are also considered. Proposals are made for corpus-based research into the language of films, and into translation (and mediation) universals. A corpus-based study of text complexity in reading tests is also presented. Large-scale corpora commercially available are also discussed. An online module for translator training is presented, as is an Internet-accessible corpus of Old English poetry.

The Editors: The three editors are tenured academics teaching English in the degree courses in languages at the University of Padua, Italy. Carol Taylor Torsello is full professor while Katherine Ackerley and Erik Castello are researchers. They share an interest in corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis, language learning with new technologies, and language testing.