Bringing corpora to the masses: free and easy tools for interdisciplinary language studies.

Despite huge promise, direct applications of corpus linguistics (CL) have yet to make substantial inroads to the language classroom. The main stumbling block is perhaps psychological: even when they are aware of the possibilities, teachers and learners alike may hesitate to change established practices and challenge traditional roles. It is difficult to alter such mindsets, but it should be possible to make corpus linguistics more user-friendly. In particular, we argue here that even using only free on-line tools with minimal training, learners are quick to see a variety of applications in language learning and other areas. This paper describes a CL option in an English MA course where students are allowed considerable freedom to discover the tools and possibilities for themselves, and pursue them to their own ends. An analysis of 30 resulting research papers highlights the diversity of approaches and topics which can be studied through CL, and discusses the wide range of skills learned in the process