Language, Individual & Society, Volume 8, 2014

Abstract: This article reports on the use of free online corpora in L2 academic literacies classes. The corpus being a record of over 100 million words, phrases and samples of spoken or written English from a variety of sources has long held potential for incorporation in second language learning. The report uses both the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus depending on the online based resource used. The article will examine the rationale for incorporating corpora in the L2 language classroom in terms of developing vocabulary clusters, developing a student’s personal corpus around a topic, examining questions of usage and register as well as error correction. With reference to university level L2 academic literacies classes, the author maintains that the corpus can be an invaluable resource to both learners and practitioners.