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

Abstract

Motivation for using corpus linguistics in English language teaching is partly related to the inconsistencies found between the use of lexical items and grammatical structures in the corpora and those in traditional language textbooks that are often largely based on the personal judgments of the materials writers. This lack of fit between the language in the textbook and authentic language use has been reported in many studies; yet, an overview of this aspect has not been carried out. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to discuss the importance of corpus linguistics for the development of English language teaching materials, and 2) to present a survey of studies carried out in the last ten years, with particular reference to the mismatches found between the language in various corpora such as Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LSWE) and British National Corpus (BNC) and that used in Finnish EFL textbooks, Malaysian ESL textbooks and Hong Kong secondary textbooks to name a few. The implication of this study is to provide L2 teachers with useful information about pedagogical corpus and the ways in which they can make optimal use of a textbook’s strong points, recognizing the shortcomings of certain exercises, tasks, or entire texts and to show how they can improve the textbook and adapt their teaching materials accordingly.