Corpus Linguistics and English Language Teaching Materials: A Review of Recent Research

Abstract

Many researchers have recommended the use of corpus-based findings to inform material writers as to L2 teaching materials (e.g. Biber & Reppen, 2002; Conrad, 1999; 2000; Carter & McCarthy, 1995; Frazier, 2003; Holmes, 1988; Harwood, 2005; Lawson, 2001, Romer, 2010, Kennedy, 2002). It is with the help of corpusbased studies that the “scope” of certain features can be investigated (Hulstijn, 1995), and according to Barbieri and Eckhardt (2007), “corpus-based analysis is an ideal tool to re-evaluate the order of presentation of linguistic features in textbooks and to make principled decisions about what to prioritize in textbook presentations”. Without this type of analysis, many believe that scripted textbook language models and dialogues are frequently unnatural and inappropriate for communicative language teaching because they depict unrealistic situations and oversimplify the language.