Corpora and second language acquisition

Paquot, Magali [UCL]

The main objective of this chapter is to provide a critical overview of the ways in which Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has made use of corpora to broaden the scope of its research instruments, inform its theories and bring new perspectives on key SLA research questions related to the underlying L2 knowledge system of learner language, its development, and what impacts upon both. The chapter starts with an historical perspective on corpora in SLA and briefly examines the relationship between SLA and the two related fields of corpus linguistics and learner corpus research. It then quickly seeks to address a selected list of core issues, mostly by answering two main questions: (1) in what ways can a reference corpus be useful in SLA?; and (2) in what ways can a learner corpus be useful in SLA?. The chapter then reports on exemplary studies that best illustrate the use of corpus tools and techniques to answer SLA research questions in an innovative way. It ends with future directions for research and a list of recommendations for increased use of corpora in Second Language Acquisition. These recommendations aim to address issues related to corpus design, corpus analysis and the open science movement.