DIY local learner corpora: Bridging gaps between theory and practice

Corpus-based research in the past two decades has undeniably had a considerable impact on language teaching. Nevertheless, there still remains a gap between what applied corpus linguistics can offer and what teachers do (or don’t do) with corpora in their teaching practice (Mukherjee, 2006). This article illustrates how compilation and analysis of corpora of student writing by teachers at a local level can help bridge this gap between theory and practice. Aimed at language teachers with no or little knowledge of corpus linguistics, we present a ‘how-to-do’ discussion of the basics of corpus creation and analysis, and suggest possible uses of data from such corpora in language teaching.