The theme of the 2001 International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English conference was “Future Challenges for Corpus Linguistics.” Some of these challenges include the need for improved methodological standardization, for a clearer link between corpus-based research and linguistic theory, and for further research into the application of corpus linguistics in language teaching. The chapters in this edited volume of proceedings from the conference show how corpus-based research has begun to address these challenges.

The book is divided into three sections: “Corpora and Methodology,” “Corpora in Language Description,” and “Corpora in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching.” The first of these sections deals with the improvement of corpus-based methodologies. The papers by Wallis and by de Mönnink, Brom, and Oostdijk highlight the need for reproducibility in corpus research. Wallis illustrates how the scientific method is applied in corpus linguistics through a description of experiments using parsed corpora, whereas de Mönnink et al. test the reproducibility of Biber's Multidimensional Analysis. Renouf and Peters and Smith address the use of the Internet as a corpus resource. Renouf describes WebCorp, a tool that allows corpus linguists to access the Internet in a more research-oriented manner than traditional search engines. Peters and Smith examine the way the electronic medium has an impact on text structure, highlighting differences between documents created for an electronic medium and those created for a print medium. Finally, Oostdijk looks at the impact disfluencies have on spoken corpora, particularly with regard to the parsing of spoken data.

The second section of the book, “Corpora in Language Description,” reflects the wide variety of topics that corpus-based research has addressed. The papers by Gotti and Nurmi both examine aspects of modal usage in Early Modern English. Mukherjee adds to the emerging area of spoken corpus research with a demonstration of how corpus data support a theoretical model of linguistic structures (known as “talk units”) that are formed through the interaction of syntactic and prosodic features. The three chapters by Kettemann, König, and Marko, Kjellmer, and Hajar and Rahim describe corpus-based approaches to lexical research. Ketteman et al. compare data from the Oxford English Dictionary with data from the British National Corpus, whereas Kjellmer examines lexical gaps in the Cobuild corpus and Hajar and Rahim use corpus data to study code-switching by Malay native speakers (NSs) writing in English. In the last chapter in this section, Sampson uses data from a grammatically annotated corpus to describe the development of the structural aspects of the writing produced by NS children.

Of most relevance for SLA researchers is the third section of the book, which deals with corpora and foreign language teaching and learning. The first two chapters in this section present corpus-based studies of learners' written interlanguage, as represented in the International Corpus of Learner English: Aronsson compares the use of it-clefts and pseudoclefts in the writing of advanced Swedish learners of English and NSs and explains the Swedish learners' overuse of these structures in terms of information structure, whereas Neff et al. describe a contrastive study of the use of modal and reporting verbs in the expression of stance by French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German learners of English. The last chapters explore the integration of corpus-based tools into the foreign language classroom. Schmied describes German students' use of and reactions to the Chemnitz Internet Grammar, an electronic hypertext grammar of English that provides learners with authentic corpus-based examples. In the final chapter, Pérez-Paredes discusses how a networked computer-assisted language learning environment can be used to collect oral interlanguage data and how the resulting corpus can be used in the classroom.

As a whole, the papers in this volume give the reader an excellent view of the current state of corpus-based research. Because many of the chapters require some background in corpus-based research methods, this book is not for those new to the field of corpus linguistics. It should be of interest to researchers and language educators with a basic understanding of corpus-based work who wish to gain a view of some of the recent advances in the field.