Over the past several decades, corpus linguistics has had a great deal of influence on the field of applied linguistics, particularly in the development of dictionaries, grammar references, and textbooks. Although corpus linguistics has contributed to the development of materials for language study, the integration of corpus approaches into university language courses themselves is more problematic. This volume aims both to introduce newcomers to the use of corpora and to disseminate information on current research in the field by presenting examples of how this integration is being attempted at various Italian universities. The 17 chapters cover a wide range of topics and tend to focus more on practical aspects of the projects than on the theoretical implications of any findings; a number of the chapters report uncompleted research projects, and readers should not expect substantial discussions of results.

The volume is divided into three sections. The four chapters in the first section serve as a clear, though basic, introduction to language corpora. The first chapter discusses how to compile corpora and how to interpret findings, and it gives examples of insights that corpora can provide into terms and phrases in language for specific purposes. An appendix also provides some basic steps for assembling a corpus and downloading free concordancing software, although this information is not integrated in any meaningful way with the chapter itself. The second chapter introduces learner corpora through a description of the construction of the Italian component of the international corpus of learner English and research associated with it. The third chapter examines the use of corpora in translator training. The fourth chapter describes the annotation of a multimodal corpus and the functional-notional concordancing that allows the corpus to be searched by language functions (e.g., stating facts) and notions (personal identification: name). This last chapter is perhaps the most interesting, in that it presents an alternative to traditional, text-based corpora. However, the link provided to the Web-based multimodal concordancer is nonfunctional.

The second section presents examples of possible corpus research projects and includes chapters on a variety of topics. There are two chapters on corpus-assisted discourse analysis, a chapter on using large-scale corpora such as the bank of English, two chapters on translation studies, a chapter on using corpora to establish text complexity for assessment purposes, and a chapter on the compilation of a corpus of academic language. Although many of the projects are interesting, they do not always seem to match the volume’s stated target audience; it is not clear, for example, what use a language teacher might make of Clark’s analysis of the discourse of war correspondents embedded within military units.

The final section is comprised of six chapters intended to provide language teachers with ideas on how to use corpora in their own classes. Five of the six chapters present real or hypothetical examples of how corpora can be used in syllabus design, the teaching of writing or literature, or translator training. The other chapter offers a description of the new extensible markup language (XML) version of the British national corpus. This section is the most practical or hands-on of the volume but perhaps suffers the most from the transition from the original workshop presentation to the page. For example, Aston’s chapter on the new version of the British national corpus provides many screenshots, but whether readers would find these useful in navigating the corpus on their own is questionable. Brunetti’s chapter on tagging Old English poetry is an interesting account of the project but should not be any reader’s introduction to XML tagging. Many of the chapters point out that learners must be trained in the use of these corpus tools, but the actual training procedures are glossed over, and the various screenshots and descriptions do not give the impression that these tools are particularly user-friendly.

There are many interesting ideas presented in this volume, although the wide variety of the topics means that none are dealt with in any great depth, and it is unlikely that an individual reader will find all of the topics relevant. Additionally, several of the chapters describe projects that may be of interest to researchers but not to the eponymous teachers. Finally, several of the hands-on chapters seem to have lost some of their utility when transferred to the page. Although this volume might inspire a language teacher previously unfamiliar with corpora, the successful implementation of the use of corpora in the classroom will require more guidance than is provided here.