Gavioli's volume, published in Benjamins' “Studies in Corpus Linguistics” series, states that its aim is to “discuss the relevance of corpus work for learners of English as a foreign language,” focusing on English for specific purposes (ESP) settings, with an intended audience of “materials designers, teachers and applied linguists in general” (p. 1). Gavioli explicitly states that she does not provide any comparison of corpus-based instruction to other, traditional methods to evaluate their effectiveness but that her view is that they “can be largely complementary” (p. 3).
What is particularly useful in this volume is Gavioli's insightful description of what learners see when they look at concordance data and her collection of classroom activities for students working with corpora and concordances in an ESP (which could also be extended to a general language for specific purposes [LSP]) setting. The greatest value of the volume lies in chapter 6, devoted to how to guide learners in working with corpora and corpus data, and chapter 7, a report on a number of successful examples of such work.
It has recently been pointed out that in order for corpus analysis to become an accepted feature of language learning, practicing teachers need to be convinced to use corpora and concordances in the classroom (Bernardini, 2005; Römer, 2006). It is unclear whether Gavioli succeeds on this point. Although the volume is not a how-to manual for teachers who have no or little experience working with corpus data, it makes it clear that in addition to being highly computer-literate, ESP teachers who set their students loose on corpus data will have to be highly proficient and metalinguistically aware to be able to explain all of the different patterns and examples that inevitably crop up when dealing with authentic language. On the other hand, those teachers and materials developers who already are relatively experienced corpus users will find a great deal of incentive and some good ideas in Gavioli's work.
How transferable and generalizable are the tasks developed by the author herself? Although Gavioli's student groups represent a specific, local context (Italian university undergraduates), the descriptions of typical learner reactions seem applicable to foreign language learners in general. Gavioli's exercises are described in their original context, and, with minor modifications or greater adaptations, they could be transferred to many different LSP contexts. The frank tone (not sweeping difficult aspects under the carpet) and the many ideas for corpus activities presented have the effect of making this an attractive and practical volume for teachers who wish to explore corpora with their LSP students.
The kind of learning stressed in Gavioli's volume is discovery-based and autonomous. At times, the strong belief in inductive learning leads to naïve statements like “concordances seem to provide puzzles to those who look at them and require an action to solve them” (p. 85), although there are also references to the difficulties involved in such methods. On the whole, it would have strengthened the volume's case to include more deductive and teacher-led activities based on corpora.
Although promoting the use of small, specialized corpora in ESP learning, Gavioli does not give any instructions (or references to other works that do) on how one might go about creating one. At the same time, she correctly emphasizes the problem of corpus availability. Gavioli proclaims that ESP and specialized corpora make a happy marriage, but as long as the lack of available corpora persists, we are not likely to see much marital bliss in this area. Furthermore, the copyright issue—perhaps the greatest obstacle to corpus creation—is not mentioned at all.
Suffering from a large number of inconsistencies and errors, the manuscript would have benefited from more in-depth editing and proofreading. Furthermore, the author's occasional weakness for presenting detailed frequencies in the running text makes the volume unnecessarily long. Either a quick summary or a table plus some brief commentary would suffice in most cases.
Although it is easy to get carried away about new methods and tools for the classroom, Gavioli's approach is a balanced one. Her view is that corpora and corpus tools should not replace traditional and carefully developed tools like grammars, dictionaries, or style guides; it is when these tools are not sufficient that corpora and concordances can prove highly useful. This is, of course, particularly likely to happen in ESP, where the level of specialization creates needs that are rarely met by general reference works.
