COMPUTER LEARNER CORPORA, SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, AND FOREIGN
LANGUAGE TEACHING. Sylviane Granger, Joseph Hung, and Stephanie
Petch-Tyson (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x + 246.
$42.95 paper.
Insights derived from language corpora have influenced countless
aspects of language teaching, testing, research, and materials
development. Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson have created an
indispensable testament to the specific value of corpora in SLA
research. A great virtue of this volume is that the corpus is treated
as a tool, and the tool does not distract from the job at hand. The
focus is where it should be—on features of native language,
interlanguage, and target language as elucidated by corpus-based study.
The corpora stand in the background, ready to serve.