The papers in this volume come from the fifth TaLC meeting in Bertinoro, Italy, in 2002 and address a range of issues related to using corpora for language learning and teaching. The introductory chapter by the three editors provides an overview of the book and also recaps the conference discussion between Sinclair and Widdowson regarding the nature of authentic language and its place in language instruction. The main portion of the book is divided into three sections: “Corpora by Learners,” “Corpora for Learners,” and “Corpora with Learners.” These three sections are framed by two chapters: one by Hoey on lexical priming and a final chapter by Fletcher on using the web as a resource for creating corpora.

The first section, “Corpora by Learners,” includes chapters from a range of linguistic perspectives including Universal Grammar in Tono's chapter on comparisons of first language, interlanguage, and target language use of high-frequency verbs by Japanese learners of English, and Flowerdew's systemic functional linguistic perspective, using APPRAISAL to compare problem-solution patterns in apprentice and professional technical writing. The chapters in this section also cover a range of languages and levels of investigation, from lexis to discourse. A range of techniques is used to analyze the information presented. Most chapters use descriptive approaches or statistics to describe or highlight what is found in the language investigated. In contrast, the chapter by Chipere, Malvern, and Richards uses a corpus of children's writing to demonstrate the effect of sample size on type/token ratios, providing valuable information regarding this often used measure, and how it can be influenced by text length and other issues.

In the second section, “Corpora for Learners,” chapters address the complex issue of what learners are exposed to, and how corpora can perhaps be used to better inform teaching material. In this section, Mauranen reports on a study using spoken corpora in the language classroom. In addition to describing the use of MICASE for learning academic spoken English with Finnish university students, she reminds readers of issues related to the use of a native speaker (NS) model of English versus English as lingua franca model for instruction. In an innovative chapter, Frankenberg-Garcia describes the use of parallel corpora with Portuguese learners of English. Although frequently used in translation studies, there has been little use of parallel corpora for language instruction.

In the final section, “Corpora with Learners,” the chapters focus on learners interacting with corpora for their own language instruction. Most of the chapters in this section investigate the use of corpora in the classroom through some type of concordancing activity. However, two chapters in this section stand out because they go beyond the typical approach in which learners interact with the target language through concordancing software. First, Sripicharn reports on a study that used the same set of concordance lines with both NSs of English and NSs of Thai with the goal of exploring the strategies used by native and nonnative speakers when using concordance output. Second, the chapter by Pérez-Paredes and Cantos-Gómez uses oral student output and involves the learners in the analysis of their output through several measures, including vocabulary, noun modification, and comparison to a target corpus. The teachers in the study also had use of various statistical measures to compare student production to a target corpus; this could then help inform the teacher's feedback to the students.

This volume is a nice addition to the Benjamins series Studies in corpus linguistics. For anyone interested in corpora and issues related to using corpora in the language classroom, this book covers a range of topics from a variety of perspectives. The topics covered and the number of chapters that address actual classroom use of corpora reflect the increased interest in corpora as an area of relevance for language instruction. This increased interest, as mentioned in many of the chapters, calls for careful research to be done in this area. Many of the studies presented in the book could be replicated in language classrooms without too much difficulty, even by teachers who do not have a background in corpus linguistics but who are comfortable with computers. One task left undone, but alluded to in several of the chapters in this volume, is the need for explicit investigations regarding the use of corpora for language instruction. Perhaps the next TaLC meeting will produce a volume addressing studies that explore the effectiveness of using corpora for language instruction in comparison with other instructional approaches.