In recent years, conferences on applied linguistics and teacher development, as well as published material such as books, articles and newsletters, frequently refer to developments and findings in the field of corpus linguistics. An increasing number of materials and resources for use in language teaching and learning now boast that they are ‘corpus-based’ or ‘corpus-informed’. Indeed, in the pioneering area of learners' dictionaries, one could hardly imagine any major publisher nowadays putting out a dictionary that was not based on a corpus, such was the revolution sparked off by Sinclair's COBUILD dictionary project in the 1980s. Similarly, corpus information, in recent years, seems to be becoming de rigueur as the basis of the compilation of major reference grammars, and, more and more, as a major feature of coursebooks, though here the picture is more patchy at the time of writing.

However, widespread use of ‘corpus linguistics’ does not mean that the term or its findings are necessarily fully or widely understood in the context of language pedagogy. In addition, many important developments in the field of corpus linguistics are not always communicated or usefully mediated in terms of their implications for language teaching. This is possibly because corpus linguists are very often not language teachers and spend a lot of time talking with one another rather than with teachers. This book aims to address the frequent mismatch between corpus linguistics research and what goes into materials and resources, and what goes on in the language classroom.