Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.

The paper presents an example of the indirect use of corpora in language pedagogy. It centres on a comparative analysis of modal auxiliaries, their distribution, meanings, and contexts, in spoken British English corpus data and in selected texts from EFL textbooks. A focus lies on the differences observed between authentic English as used in natural communicative situations and the kind of synthetic English that pupils are often confronted with in the classroom. It is argued that, if taken seriously, corpus evidence can contribute to an improvement of teaching materials and that it is essential, especially in pedagogical contexts, to pay more attention to frequent phenomena and typical patterns of used language.

The aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively studied, there have been no analyses of the frequency, form, and function of relevant types and tokens in the input. This article reports the results of 2 corpus-based studies investigating how various features of the inputfrequency distributions, reliabilities of form-function mapping, and prototypicality of lexical aspect-affect TA morphology. Study I determined the relative frequency profiles of exemplars of English TA and employed various statistics to determine the associations between particular verb-aspect combinations. Study II expanded the aspect hypothesis, examining whether native speakers judge the most frequent forms in isolation to be more prototypical in lexical aspect. Analyses were then matched against acquisition data for different TA patterns by adult learners of English (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000) to determine whether the verbs' acquisition order is determined by their frequency, form, and function in the input. Rather than testifying to the effect of 1 factor alone, the results suggest that frequency, distinctiveness, and prototypicality jointly drive acquisition.THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES THE ACQUISITION of tense-aspect (henceforth TA) morphology from a constructionist perspective ( Tomasello, 2003). The basic tenets are as follows: Language is intrinsically symbolic. It is constituted by a structured inventory of constructions as conventionalized form-meaning pairings used for communicative purposes. Constructions are of different levels of complexity and abstraction; they can comprise concrete and particular items (as in words and idioms), more abstract classes of items (as in word classes and abstract grammatical constructions), or complex combinations

This paper focuses on the interface of lexis and grammar and provides corpus evidence for the inseparability of two areas that have traditionally been kept apart, both in language teaching and in linguistic analysis and description. The paper will first give an overview of a number of influential research strands and model-building attempts in this area (Pattern Grammar and Collostructional Analysis, among others) and then explore the use of a selected lexical-grammatical pattern, the introductory it pattern (e.g. it is essential for EFL learners to come to grips with connotations, attested example) in corpora of expert and apprentice academic writing.

Each of us as language learners had different language experiences, yet somehow we have converged upon broadly the same language system. From diverse, often noisy samples, we have attained similar linguistic competence. How so? What mechanisms channel language acquisition? Could our linguistic commonalities possibly have converged from our shared psychology of learning as applied to the evidence of similar-enough language experience? This article outlines a research program to investigate whether there are sufficient constraints in the dynamics of language to promote robust induction by means of statistical learning over limited samples. It illustrates the approach with regard to English verbs, their grammatical form, semantics, and Zipfian patterns of usage. It explores the emergence of structure from experience using methods from cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, learning theory, complex systems, and network science.