During the last 10 years, there has been an increased interest in access to corpora and the ability to perform corpus analyses from both language researchers and language teachers. The questions of which corpus to use and what tools are available for helping to search a corpus often plague language teachers. This volume helps to address this question by providing a book and an accompanying CD-ROM that contains a corpus and 27 tools.

The Corpus of Irish English, included with this book, is well designed and covers a range of different genres (e.g., novels, plays, religious texts) and periods (i.e., the Middle Ages through the beginning of the 20th century), thus offering the user a variety of different types of analysis that can be performed. The corpus would be a useful resource for courses on stylistics, diachronic change, or dialect studies.

The suite of 27 tools included with this book allows users to perform many functions, including basic concordance searches (e.g., identifying a word and seeing what words co-occur with the target word), identifying word clusters, and tagging texts with grammatical information. The tools also include a database manager along with various editors and file managers. In addition to the variety of tasks that can be performed with the tools provided, one of the real advantages of this book is that the tools can be used with other corpora, including those created by the user.

Although the book claims that the tools can be used by novices, I found that the user interface was not always transparent. However, if the user is comfortable with computers and takes a little time to explore the various tools, then the user will be able to take full advantage of the powerful array of tools that make up this volume.