Edited by Henry Tyne and Stefania Spina, Applying Corpora in Teaching and Learning Romance Languages is a timely contribution to applied corpus linguistics and language pedagogy. Although the volume is not devoted exclusively to French, its relevance to French language studies is substantial. French recurs throughout the book as a key site for examining spoken corpora, listening comprehension, learner discourse, classroom interaction, writing development and corpus-informed teaching. The volume can therefore be read alongside work on data-driven learning (DDL) and authentic language use in language pedagogy (Boulton & Cobb, Reference Boulton and Cobb2017; Boulton & Tyne, Reference Boulton and Tyne2014), as well as recent studies of interactional corpora for French as a foreign language (André, Reference André2018; Ravazzolo & Etienne, Reference Ravazzolo and Etienne2019).
The editors situate the book against a familiar imbalance: corpus applications in language teaching have developed largely through English, while comparable work on other languages has often remained less visible or less systematically integrated into classroom practice. By focusing on Italian, French, Catalan and Spanish, and by organizing the chapters thematically rather than by language, the volume highlights shared pedagogical concerns across Romance-language contexts while still allowing the contribution of French-oriented research to emerge.
The book comprises an introduction and fifteen chapters, grouped into five sections: surveys; writing and translation; data-driven learning; acquisition; and teaching, teaching materials and classroom practice. Pascual Pérez-Paredes and Angela Chambers open with a useful survey of corpora and DDL in the teaching and learning of French and Spanish, emphasizing that corpora require teacher training, accessible design and learner-facing activities if they are to influence pedagogy. Christian Surcouf’s chapter on spoken French corpora and listening comprehension is one of the strongest contributions from a French studies perspective. Moving from Le français fondamental to more recent initiatives such as FLORALE, it shows why everyday spoken French matters pedagogically: learners often struggle not because they lack grammatical knowledge, but because spoken French outside the classroom differs markedly from scripted textbook input.
The section on writing and translation includes chapters whose relevance to French is either direct or transferable. María Luisa Carrió-Pastor’s chapter on mitigation and boosting in Spanish academic writing reports an experiment with 48 L1 Spanish students, who identified and classified mitigation and boosting devices and their collocates in a corpus of Spanish linguistics articles. This concrete design shows how corpus analysis can be translated into classroom tasks. Nancy Gagné and Anna Joan Casademont’s study of Catalan writing by L1 French learners brings French into the discussion through crosslinguistic influence. Claire Doquet and Arnaud Moysan’s chapter is especially pertinent, since it examines the ECRISCOL corpus of L1 French student writing, which contains more than 2,000 texts together with drafts and rewriting operations. Its attention to developmental variation, including the observation that connectors tend to give way to punctuation as students progress, shows how corpora can illuminate first-language French writing development.
The two chapters on DDL focus on Italian, yet they remain instructive for French pedagogy. Elisa Corino’s work on Italian for specific purposes and Luciana Forti’s study of Italian L2 phraseological competence show how concordance-based activities can promote metalinguistic awareness, lexical precision and phraseological learning. The acquisition section returns more directly to French through Delin Deng’s chapter on French discourse markers in L2 speech. Based on sociolinguistic interviews with 40 Chinese L1 speakers of French in France, it examines discourse-marker frequency and extralinguistic factors such as gender, age, professional status, length of stay and contact with L1 speakers. This is a welcome contribution because discourse markers are central to spoken fluency and interactional competence, yet they are often undertaught in formal French instruction.
The final section contains several chapters of direct interest to French specialists. Anne-Marie Bezzina Busuttil’s corpus-based study of teachers’ questioning strategies in the French L2 classroom examines spoken interaction in Maltese secondary schools and shows how classroom corpora can reveal interactional patterns that might otherwise remain unnoticed. The chapters on Spanish teachers’ views and corpus design echo a problem also relevant to French: teachers may be interested in corpora but still require training, accessible interfaces and curricular support. The concluding chapter by Carmen Alberdi, Virginie André and Carole Etienne is another highlight. Focusing on storytelling in French as a foreign language, it shows how CLAPI-FLE and FLEURON can help learners observe interactional storytelling as it occurs in everyday conversation, rather than as a written narrative form transferred into speech.
A major strength of the volume is that it treats corpora not merely as repositories of examples, but as tools for discovery learning, teacher reflection, acquisition research and classroom intervention. Its sustained attention to spoken language is particularly important for French, where the gap between classroom norms and everyday interaction remains pedagogically challenging. The book also succeeds in placing French within a broader Romance-language landscape. There are, however, some limitations. The coverage of individual Romance languages is necessarily uneven: readers looking for a volume exclusively centred on French pedagogy may find some chapters less immediately relevant, and Portuguese and Romanian are absent. In addition, some chapters move more convincingly than others from corpus-based analysis to concrete pedagogical implementation. A concluding synthesis on Romance-language teacher education, and perhaps on French in particular, would have strengthened the volume.
Overall, Applying Corpora in Teaching and Learning Romance Languages is a significant contribution to applied corpus linguistics and corpus-informed language pedagogy. For readers of the Journal of French Language Studies, its value lies in the way it foregrounds issues central to the teaching and learning of French: spoken corpora, listening comprehension, classroom interaction, learner discourse, writing development and pragmatic competence. The volume will be valuable to researchers in French applied linguistics, corpus linguistics and SLA, as well as to teacher educators and graduate students interested in bringing authentic language data into French language teaching.
