Corpus Approaches to Discourse and Second Language Research

The growth of the use of corpus approaches in the analysis of many different types of language and languages is exponential, and the nature and variety of corpora to explore is vast. It is therefore not surprising that corpora are used increasingly to provide evidence in second language acquisition studies and in discourse analyses, although few studies fully integrate these three. This chapter focuses on studies that have used corpus approaches to investigate language for learners and learner language. It first describes the impact of corpus linguistics on English language teaching materials. It then introduces contrastive linguistic analysis and learner corpus research. In Section 3, corpus studies are presented that aim to capture discourse features of second language texts, as well as those that aim to explore second language acquisition concepts. In Section 4, a cross-sectional and a longitudinal design study are presented. The fifth section considers the impact of corpus analysis of second language texts on teaching, including ‘data-driven learning’. The final section points to future directions. This is followed by suggestions for further reading, references, and a list of acronyms used.