TEACHING AND LEARNING BY DOING CORPUS ANALYSIS

TEACHING AND LEARNING BY DOING CORPUS ANALYSIS. Bernard Ketteman and Georg Marko (Eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Pp. vii + 390. $148.00 cloth. This substantial volume contains 23 papers selected from the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TALC) held in Graz, Austria in the summer of 2000. Like many edited conference proceedings, the chapters in this book vary quite widely in both the quality and quantity of the work presented. Further, the substance of some of the stronger contributions—such as Coxhead on academic vocabulary and Lee on a genre-specific index for the British National Corpus (BNC)—had already appeared in journals at the time of this volume's publication (Coxhead in TESOL Quarterly and Lee in Language Learning and Technology). In his opening remarks, McEnery salutes the widening range of topics in this volume, but I am less sanguine about the value of adding breadth. Certainly, the new emphasis on the role of corpora in translation studies and the teaching of translation in the final section is well motivated, but it is less clear whether Renouf's discussion of short-dimension diachronic change or Flowerdew's use of language learning diaries has much to do with the central issues in TALC.