Building corpora for English language teaching

Corpus-based studies are becoming more and more common in research in English language teaching. Electronic corpora are being compiled and analysed for designing English language courses, writing teaching materials, and to help users gain insights into the lexical, lexico-grammatical and discourse features of different genres and registers. An inevitable part of corpus-based research is the compilation of the corpus itself. The methods used for corpus design and creation – in addition to the texts comprising the corpus – determine the scope and limitations of the research queries that the corpus can be used for. Therefore, a systematic approach to collecting texts and building a corpus is essential. The chapter proposes a Comprehensive model for corpus design and creation by giving an overview of the necessary steps in corpus design and creation; it links theoretical and practical considerations by focusing on issues relevant primarily for specialised corpora for English language teaching. The chapter demonstrates how the model can guide principled corpus building by discussing a case studies of building a specialised corpus and a learner corpus. The chapter identifies further directions for future research in corpus building for English language teaching.