This volume is made up of 17 chapters which have developed out of papers and workshop sessions presented at the event entitled «Corpora: Seminar and Workshops», held at the University of Padua, March 29-31, 2007. It maintains the straightforward, practical approach which characterized that event, meant as an introduction to the use of corpora even for novices. At the same time it goes into a wide range of different applications for corpora in language teaching and language research in higher education. One of these involves the creation and use of learner corpora. Another application involves corpus-assisted research into political discourse in the media. Language for special purposes is also focussed on as a research topic, an academic discipline, and language to be translated. Multimodal corpora are also considered. Proposals are made for corpus-based research into the language of films, and into translation (and mediation) universals. A corpus-based study of text complexity in reading tests is also presented. Large-scale corpora commercially available are also discussed. An online module for translator training is presented, as is an Internet-accessible corpus of Old English poetry.

Autorentext

The Editors: The three editors are tenured academics teaching English in the degree courses in languages at the University of Padua, Italy. Carol Taylor Torsello is full professor while Katherine Ackerley and Erik Castello are researchers. They share an interest in corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis, language learning with new technologies, and language testing.

Inhalt

Contents: Carol Taylor Torsello: Dedication to John Sinclair Guy Aston: Remembering John Sinclair Carol Taylor Torsello/Katherine Ackerley/Erik Castello: Corpora for University Language Teachers: An Introduction Elena Tognini Bonelli: Corpora and LSP: Issues and Implications Maria Teresa Prat Zagrebelsky: Learner Corpora at the Crossroads of Computer Corpus Linguistics, Foreign Language Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition Research Maria Teresa Musacchio/Giuseppe Palumbo: Shades of Grey: A Corpus-driven Analysis of LSP Phraseology for Translation Purposes Francesca Coccetta: Multimodal Corpora with MCA Alan Partington: The Armchair and the Machine: Corpus-assisted Discourse Research Caroline Clark: A CADS Analysis of Television Reports from Iraq: Were Embeds `in Bed with the Coalition? Sara Gesuato: Linguistic Research with Large-scale Corpora Margherita Ulrych/Amanda Murphy: Descriptive Translation Studies and the Use of Corpora: Investigating Mediation Universals Christopher Taylor: Predictability in Film Language: Corpus-assisted Research Erik Castello: A Corpus-based Study of Text Complexity Larissa D Angelo: Creating a Corpus for the Analysis of Identity Traits in English Specialised Discourse Guy Aston: Using the XML Edition of the British National Corpus Giuseppe Brunetti: Tagging the Lexicon of Old English Poetry Anthony Baldry: Turning to Multimodal Corpus Research for Answers to a Language-course Management Crisis Katherine Ackerley: Using Comparable Expert-writer and Learner Corpora for Developing Report-writing Skills Silvia Bernardini: «What Students Want» ? Practical Suggestions for Corpus-aided Translator Education Fiona Dalziel/Francesca Helm: Exploring Modality in a Learner Corpus of Online Writing.