Considerable progress has been made in the use of corpora for research purposes to describe
language in use and more recently through a CADS (corpus assisted discourse studies) approach
to identify the discourse features of specific text genres. While the potential benefits of
working with corpora in the classroom have been recognised there has been a lag in the
promulgation of guidelines for carrying out meaningful corpus work with language learners and
teachers in mind. The papers in this volume aim to make a contribution toward filling that gap
by providing an in-depth account of innovative corpus work most of which has actually been
carried out with real learners in the classroom. Authors provide valuable insights into ways of
structuring corpus work for specific target learners as well as suggestions for resolving
problematic issues that have arisen and avoiding errors that have been made with learners and
in their own research and experimentation. The transparency and honesty with which they present
their methodology and results along with the successful techniques they have developed
constitute a step forward in defining good (and bad) practice in the use of corpora in
learning.
