This is the 12th volume in Benjamins' estimable Studies in corpus linguistics series and has been edited by Sinclair, in many ways the doyen of the field. After an introduction by the editor, the collection is divided into five sections. The first four cover “The Corpus and the Teacher,” “Resources—Corpora,” “Research,” and “Resources—Computing” and contain a total of eleven papers. The final section contains a single long essay by Sinclair, entitled “Prospects.” As these headings indicate, the range of this volume is somewhat broader than a perusal of its title alone might indicate.

Like most edited collections, the quality of the individual contributions varies somewhat, but most are strong and all worth publishing. In general, the more impressive papers have been authored by the more senior members of the corporist community: Bernardini, Tsui, Conrad, Mauranen, Barlow, and Sinclair himself. However, all the papers contain valuable information, especially for those teachers and applied linguists intending to make greater use of corpus resources. For example, Nesselhauf has a valuable appendix listing current learner corpora and learner corpus projects.

After a few opening remarks about how and why corporist approaches have been relatively slow to take off, Sinclair's introduction is essentially a succinct road map to the volume as a whole. Chapters by Bernardini and Tsui follow. The former traces developments in data-driven or discovery learning and outlines her experiences in helping advanced translation students in Italy develop “a researcher attitude toward data” (p. 21). Bernardini offers a valuable set of informed perspectives as to pros and cons of turning students into corpus linguists and, thus, well-situates many of the later papers in the volume. Tsui follows with an outstanding paper detailing her experiences in Hong Kong with running an online resource that provides corpora to help English as a second language teachers resolve their questions about the English language, such as the different uses of tall and high. She concludes that teachers need “to experience formulating generalizations about linguistic patterns that they have observed so that they own the grammar as much as linguistic researchers” (p. 59).

Conrad's chapter opens the second section and also deals with the problem of language teachers wanting cut and dried rules, rather than coming to appreciate how language choices are subtly affected by registral and other preferences. She goes on to show, as do several of the other papers, that there are significant mismatches between spoken corpus data and generalizations in ESL textbooks. Mauranen also deals with speech, and impressively combines acute insights about spoken academic English with a broadly intellectual approach. As in much of her work, she does not shirk the difficult questions; in particular, she discusses what broadly transcribed concordance lines can and cannot do for the average language learner. Although this way of presenting material has several advantages, she notes that “transforming awareness or knowledge into capacity is a problem which can hardly be solved with corpora alone” (p.103). The two remaining papers in this section are more descriptive: Periera shows (surprisingly, at least to me) how broad and deep the corpus resources are for Portuguese, and Nesselhauf provides a solid overview of work to date with learner corpora.

The two chapters in the third section, by Tankó and Römer, deal with sentence connectors and English auxiliaries, respectively. In the case of the former, categorizations are not always clear and, in the latter, the attempt to assist German learners with English modals is somewhat weakened by the fact that full and contracted modals are lumped together (will/'ll). For example, in the MICASE data for this pair, monosyllabic high-frequency subjects are much more likely to trigger contractions than longer, less common ones.

The penultimate section opens with a model paper by Barlow, who explores, with splendidly worked examples, how different modes of analysis affect results. The other two technical papers, Danielsson on Perl programming and Pérez-Paredes on corpora and network-based language teaching, would have benefited from greater exemplification to bring their points home to language teachers. Finally, the volume is rounded off by Sinclair's concluding essay. There is not space here to do this piece justice, but it should be of interest to all open-minded people concerned with how languages can best be described. He argues, inter alia, that ambiguity is a myth created by general linguists, that variation is an essential property of a language but can be made accessible by judicious corpus work, and that we are still struggling to construct an appropriate terminology to manage the new insights that corpus linguistics has brought to light.