Corpus linguistics has transformed the landscape of empirical research on languages in recent decades. The proliferation of corpus technology has enabled researchers worldwide to conduct research in their own geographical locations with few hindrances. It has become increasingly commonplace for researchers to compile their own corpora for specific research questions or to conduct research on the basis of corpora constructed by other researchers. Moreover, corpus linguistics has become accessible to language teachers, providing ideas, instructions and new opportunities to apply corpus techniques, corpus-based materials and activities in their classrooms (e.g., Bennett 2010; Reppen 2010; Scheffler 2011).

This report describes ongoing research on reading in African languages. It draws mainly on contributions from two British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) ‘Language in Africa’ (LiA) Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings: the LiA SIG strand at BAAL 2013 and the seminar on Reading Methodologies in African Languages held at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in January 2014. This report will only cover contributions that focused on reading research and practice.