The Trinity Lancaster Corpus:Applications in language teaching and materials development

Corpora and corpus techniques have long been an important source of knowledge about language; they have also been increasingly used for language teaching purposes. This chapter discusses the role of spoken learner corpora in language pedagogy and in development of language teaching materials. In particular, it focuses on the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC) and its pedagogical applications. With over four million words, the TLC is one of the largest corpora of L2 spoken English, representing language from L2 English speakers engaged in different speaking tasks. The chapter uses data from the TLC to illustrate the use of corpus findings in teaching pragmatics in spoken language use, focusing on three case studies: expression of disagreement, ability to adjust language choice according to linguistic setting, and engaged listenership