Norm and Use in the language Classroom: the Case of Corpora (pp.70-83)

Grammar, dictionaries and course-books have traditionally been used by learners and teachers as the only ‘norm’- providing sources . Corpus linguistics has recently provided a new perspective to foreign language (FL) teaching. Language corpora represent a new resource for teachers and learners, they are a powerful pedagogic tool to encourage learners to individually explore language in ‘use’. The advantages of the use of corpora in language teaching are also linked to the idea that the student becomes a researcher into language, forming hypotheses and testing them against the data provided by the corpus as well as by manuals. Do language corpora provide an effective learning tool for FL learners? The main aim of this experimental study was to examine the effectiveness of the parallel use of corpus-based and traditional teaching materials and practices