A practical introduction to corpora in a teacher training language awareness programme

This paper sets out a series of awareness tasks for introducing ESL teachers to English language corpora and concordances. Teachers start by examining single words, related words and structures against a single corpus, then compare features of English across different types of corpora, and finally explore the different corpora on their own. The main aim of the tasks is not so much to teach teachers more about the English language, but to make them more critical of how English is described and presented in course materials and elsewhere, and to show them that corpora are a good resource for language investigation.