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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

English for Specific Purposes

journal homepage: http://ees.elsevier.com/esp/default.asp

Book Review

Corpus linguistics for English teachers: New tools, online resources, and classroom activities, E. Friginal. Routledge,
New York, NY (2018). 345 pp., $39.96 Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-138-12309-0

Although heralded to revolutionize grammar teaching nearly two decades ago (Conrad, 2000), corpus linguistics (CL) has
had a slow emergence into the language learning classroom. Mukherjee and Rohrback (2006) pointed to a widening gap and a
growing lag between on-going and intensive corpus linguistic research on the one hand and classroom teaching on the other;
they attribute this lack of collaboration to differing viewpoints, also highlighting a distinction between frequency and rele-
vance. Specifically considering issues with using corpora to inform materials for writing instruction, Gilquin, Granger, and
Paquot (2007) discuss relevance, as the discipline specific nature of writing and the individual differences among learners
(e.g. language level, goals, target language) seem nearly impossible to reconcile. Despite these gaps, strides have been made
for using corpora in the classroom, either through corpus-based materials or the use of data driven learning (DDL); in a recent
meta-analysis of 64 studies involving the use of DDL in English language classrooms, Boulton and Cobb (2017) found that DDL
is effective and efficient for students, especially in foreign language environments.
The publication of Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers (CLET) is timely as an effective text to help further bridge the
understanding of corpus linguistics and its role in the language learning classroom. The aim of the text is three-fold (p. 23):
presentation of classroom activities, emphasis on how corpus tools can benefit students, and provision of materials for
teacher-learners in MA courses. The book succeeds in each of these areas, providing teacher-learners/researchers with a solid
understanding of what CL is as well as what it can do.
CLET is divided into three sections. Part A provides theoretical underpinnings of corpus linguistics, such as sociocultural
approaches, interaction, authenticity, and autonomy, which serves to provide a solid understanding of not only what you can
do with corpora, but why you would use corpus linguistics. Many users of the corpus approach can get caught up in its novelty
without truly understanding the theoretical underpinnings, and this is a real strength of the book. Part A also discusses
instructional approaches associated with CL, namely educational/instructional technology, CALL, and DDL. Part A alone is a
standout, accessible overview to the field of corpus linguistics and anyone who has a basic idea of what corpus linguistics is,
but wants to have a fuller understanding of its theory, purposes, and uses would benefit from this section.
Part B of CLET is a natural follow on from Part A; now that readers have an understanding of what corpus linguistics is, Part
B provides a comprehensive list of selected corpus tools. Given the ever-increasing number of corpora, software, and other
tools available for use in CL, no one text could cover all possible sources, but CLET has done a good job presenting some of the
most useful and relevant sources readers may be interested in. Firstly, Part B provides a thorough description of many
available corpora from a range of topicsdspoken, written, learner, English varieties, and ESPdalong with an extensive list of
software such as taggers, visualizers, and a range of concordancers. Part B also provides an explanation of the considerations
and steps involved in creating your own corpora. Finally, Part B provides an annotated bibliography of CL studies, divided into
three sections: 1) corpus linguistics in the classroom, 2) corpus linguistics and writing (learner writing), and 3) corpus lin-
guistics and spoken learner data. This section is another standout portion of the book, again providing the reader with an idea
of what has been done and what could be done.
Part C takes corpora to the classroom, opening with an excellent case study from Friginal about his use of corpora in course
development for a writing for forestry course. If you read nothing else in this book, read the first section of part C; it is a clear,
convincing construction of why corpora should be used in the language learning classroom. One quote Friginal shared based
on student feedback from the case study aptly captures the reason for use of corpora in the language learning classroom, but
also perhaps one reason its adoption has been slow: “So this lesson got me thinking about who to follow. If the writing
textbook tells me to use active, but professors write in the passive, what should my model be?” (p. 206). This idea illustrates
the descriptive, useful nature of corpora, even if it contrasts with users’ intuitions. The rest of Part C contains lesson plans
written by the author’s former students in response to a materials development project for the MA courses from which
materials for the book were drawn. The lesson plans are divided into three categories based on the targeted feature, 1) vo-
cabulary instruction, 2) grammar, and 3) discourse, mainly used in EAP and ESP courses. Use of students’ work in CLET is one of
its best features, and the vignettes following each lesson plan, which provide the thought process behind the lessons, will also

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be useful for teachers who wish to use or create such lessons. Because the lesson plans in part C were written as part of an MA
course, though, it’s not clear that all the lessons have been tested and improved through use in an ESL classroom; of the 13
lesson plans, only 4 mention their actual use in an English learning classroom.
In spite of the many strengths mentioned above, a couple of issues bear mentioning. Firstly, the name of the book may be a bit
misleading; one of the goals of CLET is to provide materials for students in MA courses; the book excels in addressing this goal,
but more than addressing “English teachers,” the audience is more likely English teacher-learners in a graduate study program
or teacher-researchers for individual study, rather than teachers whose exclusive focus is classroom practice. This is evidenced
in several areas. Firstly, CLET shares activities which specifically address students who are learning to teach L2 writers, such as
with questions like “How do you interpret the characteristics of L2 writing.?” (p. 54) rather than dealing with L2 writing itself.
In discussing the International Corpus of Learners English (ICLE), CLET specifically refers to its use “in an SLA course,” (p. 82), and
some of the example activities for DIY corpus creation involve planning for a PhD dissertation (p. 124); none of these activities
are particularly relevant to a practicing teacher. The discussion of several costly and difficult to acquire tools is another indi-
cation that the teacher may not be the most suitable audience for CLET. For example, a single user license of the ICLE costs
272.25V; while this would not be necessary, or likely affordable, for a classroom teacher, it could be a good investment for a
teacher-researcher or made available as part of a research program. In addition, many of the corpora mentioned in Part B are also
described according to their availability to researchers; it’s mentioned that it’s clear that many of the specialized corpora were
collected for large-scale research studies (p. 136), and tools such as the Biber tagger or T2KSWAL are not publicly available.
As mentioned earlier, no one text could cover all possible corpora or corpus tools, and CLET has done a good job presenting
the most useful and relevant sources readers may be interested in; however, as one goal of the text is to provide for corpus
materials in the classroom, CLET skips one “level” of corpus use in the classroom. Going straight to teacher-researcher created
corpora or classroom materials for use, published textbooks which rely heavily on corpora are not included in the text.
Granted, there are few books which are truly based solely on corpora, but mention of this possibility and the few available
would cover all the options for teachers.
A final issue worth mentioning is the underlying idea of native speakers as models for English instruction. While I know
the author does not intend this attitude, and in fact Campbell (one of the graduate students who submitted a lesson plan in
Part C) mentions that a goal of her course is for students to “find that English is more flexible than they might think.as such,
even their ‘Chinglish’ grammar is a variety and appropriate within a particular context” (p. 300), statements such as the
description of MICASE as providing lectures “given by NSs” (p. 95), emphasis that the British Academic Spoken English corpus
“does not necessarily feature a large amount of L2 learner output” (p. 96), and activities which specifically mimic vocabulary
and even pronunciation by call center native speakers (p. 297) does preset the need for caution against using corpora as
another means to place the native English speaker on a pedestal.
No book is perfect, and overall CLET provides a solid introduction to corpus linguistics and everything a user of corpora
may need to know, including a historical overview of the field, synthesis of research conducted with a corpus approach, a
range of possible research questions which have been or could be answered with corpus approaches, FAQs to help think about
CL from a new user perspective, and sample materials for classroom use. If you are a teacher-learner or a teacher-researcher
interested in using corpora, Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers is worth your time and money.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2018.11.003.

References

Boulton, A., & Cobb, T. (2017). Corpus use in Language Learning: A meta-analysis: Meta-analysis of corpus use in Language Learning. Language Learning,
67(2), 348-393. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12224.
Conrad, S. (2000). Will corpus linguistics revolutionize grammar teaching in the 21st century? Tesol Quarterly, 34(3), 548-560. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587743.
Gilquin, G., Granger, S., & Paquot, M. (2007). Learner corpora: The missing link in EAP pedagogy. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 6(4), 319-335.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2007.09.007.
Mukherjee, J., & Rohrback, J.-M. (2006). Rethinking applied corpus linguistics from a language-pedagogical perspective: New departures in learner corpus
research. In B. Ketterman, & G. Marko (Eds.), Planning, gluing, and painting corpora: Inside the applied corpus linguist’s corpus workshop (pp. 205-232).
Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Gena Bennett, PhD has been working with English language learners (ELLs) and future and current ELL teachers for nearly 20 years. She currently teaches in
TESOL teacher-training MA programs, both online and face to face, and has worked with the US Department of State to conduct teacher training programs in
Uzbekistan and the Dominican Republic. The 2nd ed. of her book Using Corpora in the Language Learning Classroom (with Jack Hardy) is being prepared for
publication, and she is currently working on an e-publication about online teaching as well as a co-authored book chapter about flipped classrooms.

Gena Bennett
Quantico, VA 22134, United States
E-mail address: genabennett@gmail.com

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