Rezensionen 181 Strangeness: Captivity Narratives and Issues of Race and Gender in Early America” by Christopher Cairny (Turkey). A substantial part of the material analyzed is taken from the Creole and Caribbean traditions reflected in Michell Cliff’s (Kaisa Ilmonen) and Jean Rhys’ novels (Sara Eeva, Finland). Italians and Jews were not always considered white in America, as Cheryl Alexander Malcolm (Poland) demonstrates in “The Show’s Not Over until the Schlemiel Sings: When Jewish Comedy Meets Puccini,” and Stephano Luconi (Italy) in “How Italian Americans Became White,” with the most extensive bibliography on the subject; while Salah Questrati’s (France) article suggests that Arab Americans are also not considered White. I have not mentioned a couple of contributions which did not strike me as particularly original or consistent, but the book as a whole is a very satisfying collection which should receive more recognition. Larisa Mikhaylova Moscow State University Journalism Department Encarnación Hidalgo, Luis Quereda, Juan Santana (eds.), Corpora in the Foreign Language Classroom. Selected papers from the Sixth international Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC 6). University of Granada, Spain, 4-7 July, 2004. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007 Georg Marko The book under review is the collection of selected papers presented at the 6 th TaLC (“Teaching and Language Corpora”) conference held at the University of Granada, Spain in the summer of 2004. It contains 20 contributions (+ foreword) by 28 authors from (or working in) Ireland, Norway, Germany, Japan, China, the UK, New Zealand, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Zimbabwe. Even though the conception of TaLC would allow for a wider range of topics, the editors have decided to limit the volume to research into the application of corpus analysis to foreign language teaching, which - as so often - actually means the teaching of English as a foreign language. The contributions are divided into four sections, two minor ones - “Setting the scene” (two articles) and “Afterword” (just one article) - and two major ones - “Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom” (seven articles) and “Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom” (ten articles). “Setting the scene”, supposed to present ideas running through all contributions in the volume, starts with Angela Chamber’s review article on studies of the benefits and pitfalls of monolingual corpus use by EFL learners. Although advantages clearly outnumber disadvantages, Chambers thinks that in order to realize the former, corpus-based approaches to language learning need to extend beyond the circles of researchers practicing and promoting them in academia at the moment. AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 182 The main point of Stig Johansson’s contribution is that in corpus analysis, the distinction between learning and studying a language blurs, with newly gained awareness of phenomena also influencing the learner’s language competence. Johansson illustrates how this combination of research and learning can be achieved with examples of tasks to be done with a bilingual English-Norwegian corpus and a learner corpus. The first article in section II, “Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom”, is Sabine Braun’s “Designing and exploiting small multimedia corpora for autonomous learning and teaching”. According to the author, students can better benefit from corpora if they are familiar with the situational and cultural context of the texts included, i.e. if the corpora are ‘authenticated’. This can be accomplished by a stronger focus on content, composition and annotation in the compilation process. As an example, Braun presents ELISA, a video-based interview corpus produced at Tübingen, Germany. Students can read the texts linearly or vertically (as concordances), they also have quick access to the film material, and annotations drawing upon content, text-structural and formal categories also allow them to see connections between form, meaning and function. Kiyomi Chujo, Masao Utiyama and Chikako Nishigaki in their contribution propose criteria for categorizing texts and thus by extension also corpora according to different levels of difficulty using data from a parallel corpus of English and Japanese. They additionally try to determine the correlations between these features, also across languages, so that we can, for instance, predict the problems Japanese learners will have with an English text on the basis of the difficulty of the Japanese equivalent. Peter Y.W. Lam presents a thorough, strictly corpus-driven analysis of the register of tourism, with a strong emphasis on the semantic domains exhibited by keywords and their collocations, e.g. city often appears connected to descriptions of importance (capital, main, historic), age (old, modern, ancient, new), or ranking (largest, second, oldest). The author argues that this is the kind of information at the centre of mastering a particular genre and it should therefore represent the core of teaching and learning with the help of corpora. Xiaotian Guo’s article argues that learners’ deviations from the target language are misconceived as errors and should rather be regarded as indices of the dynamic processes involved in the progression towards full acquisition. To underline the point, she presents data from a diachronic learner corpus-based case study (of a Chinese learner of English) on the development that certain forms necessarily undergo in acquisition. In “To weep perilously or W.EAP critically: the case for a corpus-based critical EAP”, Josta van Rij-Heyligers questions the role of the corpus as a prescriptive authority in the area of English for Academic Purposes not allowing learners the liberty to deal with generic conventions more creatively and critically. The author argues - with the help of some practical examples - that work with self-compiled corpora - preferably from the WWW - in combination with more social forms of learning (more groupand activity-based) may help learners to overcome these negative sides of corpora. Fanny Meunier and Céline Gouverneur analyse five general EFL textbooks and the emphasis the latter place on phraseology, a topic that has gained particular Rezensionen 183 prominence through corpus linguistics. The authors concentrate particularly on metalinguistic references to phraseology, i.e. on how and whether at all the books highlight multi-word units in their self-descriptions, section headers, and exercise instructions, and how this relates to the pedagogical presentation of this area. They come to the conclusion that even though there seems to be a growing awareness of the importance of phraseology for foreign language competence, this could be made more visible in the books, with a common theoretical and terminological framework being a desideratum. The teaching and learning of spoken communication is the main topic of Carmen Pérez Basanta and María Elena Rodríguez Martín’s article. According to the authors, typical features of oral conversations such as speech acts, politeness, implicatures, discourse markers, or turn-taking can be learned best if indirect (i.e. with teacher intervention) and direct (mostly data-driven) methods are combined in a corpusbased approach. They illustrate this by practical examples of work with a corpus of scripts of popular films. The section entitled “Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom” starts with Stephen Coffey’s description of a project in which students learn about words belonging to general semantic domains, illustrated with metals in the contribution. By combining corpus work and more traditional classroom activities (the pedagogical procedures are detailed in the article), teachers can make students find out about such diverse things as figurative meanings of words, relations between base words and their derivatives and compounds, correlations between formal and semantic features, etc. Sara Gesuato focuses on English near-synonyms normally translated by a single word in Italian with respect to semantic nuances, collocations, and usages and suggests that work with corpora can help students of language to see and experience these differences. She illustrates this with practical work involving teacher-prepared selections of concordances from the Bank of England corpus and word pairs such as island vs. isle, gratefully vs. thankfully, or adore vs. worship. David Minugh’s contribution “George Bush and the Last Crusade or the fight for truth, justice and the American way” examines the distributions of expressions such as crusade (whose use by George W. Bush provides the starting point), iron curtain, brave new world, or holocaust in their original - historic or literary - and their extended sense in a corpus of the Los Angeles Times of 1990 and the British National Corpus. The analysis shows that while words such as iron curtain or holocaust tend to be used in their original senses, crusade or brave new world often occur in different contexts. Corpus analysis can, according to Minugh, thus be employed to make students aware of the political dimensions of developments of expressions. Szilvia Papp’s article argues that the capability for self-correction by Chinese speakers, who are believed to exhibit greater inhibitions concerning learner autonomy, can be promoted through the use of reference corpora and learner corpora in combination with other pedagogical measures, e.g. requirement to regularly produce output, explicit training in inductive learning and error correction, teacher feedback, etc. “Pattern-learning and pattern-description: an integrated approach to proficiency and research for students of English” by Nele Olivier, Lieselotte Brems, Kristin Davidse, Dirk Speelman, and Hubert Cuyckens describes how students are intro- Rezensionen 184 duced to pattern learning and pattern recognition via a corpus-based learning environment at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in the early stages of their studies and how the competence acquired there proves to benefit their ability for pattern descriptions as required in their linguistic courses. The article uses the process of grammaticalization of size nouns (expressions such as bunch of, piles of, etc. may be turning into quantifiers) as an example. As the respective unit in the learning environment is based on research done by a student (Lieselotte Brems), the example also serves to show the circular relevance of the approach (better language awareness and competence through the learning environment leads to better language research, which in turn leads to an improvement of the learning environment). Julia Lavid sets out to show that students can learn a lot about lexico-grammatical patterns in English and Spanish by exploring general corpora and parallel corpora in combination with dictionaries. The main linguistic field her article is concerned with are mental process verbs and the question whether they occur in transitive or ergative patterns and which complements they can take. The author discusses results from different corpora with respect to the word pairs observe/ observar, convince/ convencer, want/ querer, and depress/ deprimir, showing similarities and differences of importance to learners of either language. In “Past progressive or simple past? The acquisition of progressive aspect by Polish advanced learners of English”, Agnieszka Leñko-Szymañska examines a learner corpus (extracts of the PELCRA learner corpus) to see how advanced Polish learners of English use the past progressive, a structure of relevance due to the complex correspondences and differences between the two languages. Len´ ko- Szyman´ ska’s data indicate that Polish learners tend to overuse the past progressive in comparison to native speakers (represented by an extract of the FLOB corpus). But as the patterns of usage (with respect to particular process types, e.g. activities, states, etc.) do not differ significantly, the former result remains difficult to interpret. The author thus primarily suggests that students should be made aware of the stylistic effects of the difference between the preterite and the past progressive. The main aim of Andy Cresswell’s article is to study the potential benefits of datadriven learning (DDL), an approach which in his view so far has been more a set of claims than a thoroughly-researched theory. For this purpose, he examines the use of certain cohesive devices by Italian advanced learners of English, with one group taking a communicative data-driven learning approach (involving group work and discussions) and the other being taught in more traditional ways. Although the measurable differences between the two groups are not extreme, there seems to be a positive effect in the DDL group, even though this sometimes also amounts to an underuse of particular devices due to a growing awareness of the problematic nature of some items. But the author admits that more research is needed to learn more about the criteria benefiting DDL, e.g. right choice of topic, better involvement of holist learner types not appreciating inductive approaches, etc. Christopher Tribble’s “Managing relationships in professional writing” deals with the correlations of social relations in business communication and linguistic features such as contraction, ellipsis, vagueness, lexical density, etc., illustrating his main point with a thorough analysis of the verb hope and its co-texts in a self-composed corpus of personal business texts such as faxes, letters, etc. Even though the connections of aspects such as horizontal social distance between interactants and the Rezensionen 185 frequency of certain items are hardly surprising from a sociolinguistic point of view, Tribble thinks that the fact that he can provide visible evidence will help sensitize students of business English more effectively to the former. The main hypothesis of Alejandro Curado Fuentes’ article is that corpus-based activities with corpora of tourism ads should improve students of tourism’s reading comprehension. He tested this assumption with an experimental group doing corpusbased work for two weeks and a control group without any such practice (being exposed to more traditional teaching instead). As the former group did significantly better in a post-test examining their understanding of content, context, function and vocabulary, the hypothesis receives substantial support. Bill Louw’s “Truth, literary worlds and devices as collocation” - appended to the volume as an “Afterword” - argues that corpus linguistics, in particular through the concepts of collocation, semantic prosody, and delexicalization, will eventually lead to a paradigm shift in language studies (also in the area of literary studies) in the shape of a rigid data orientation and a reconceptualization of mentalist notions in textual/ formal terms. Whether this actually amounts to neo-neopositivism is difficult to tell as the polemical tone of the essay makes it at times difficult to follow Louw’s argumentation. In the following evaluation, I will try to assess the value of the volume as a whole, refraining from passing judgements on individual contributions. Suffice to say that the quality of the papers - as can probably also be seen from the brief descriptions above - occasionally differs quite dramatically. Even though the editors thematically constrain the book to the use of corpora in EFL, thus passing other fields of teaching and learning also covered by TaLC conferences (and other TaLC volumes), the articles included bear evidence to the amazingly wide range of connections between language learning/ teaching and the use of corpora. Readers thus, for instance, get good insights into the many different types of corpora that can prove beneficial in EFL, i.e. monolingual vs. parallel, large and systematically-compiled vs. small and ‘dirty’, raw vs. annotated, general vs. (genre/ register-)specific, native speaker vs. learner, etc. Readers are also provided with an excellent overview of the different types of pedagogical approaches and objectives in corpus-based EFL, ranging from the learner corpus-based analysis of learner language, over the teacher-mediated use of corpora in class, to data-driven learning, i.e. the relatively unconstrained exploration of corpora by students, some of these being presented in primarily descriptive accounts from first-hand practice, others more as methodologically-sound studies in their own right. Even though the focus of the book is on English as the target language, the fact that the authors as well as the learners researched come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds adds to the colourfulness and multi-facetedness of the volume. As regards general weaknesses of the book, I see an apparent problem with its structure. The distinction between the two main sections “Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom” and “Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom” does not appear self-evident to me and is, unfortunately, not defined or explained by the editors in the introduction. The contributions assigned to the two categories do not allow any (inductive) conclusion either. Since the categories thus seem vague and the assigning somewhat arbitrary, they do not serve to guide interest and interpretation, as they normally do in edited volumes. The book therefore would fare fairly well without them. Rezensionen 186 The second problem that I see applies not only to contributions in this book but to previous collections, too - and to the TaLC conferences in general, for that matter. The main - but rarely discussed - question in this respect is how and to what degree the pedagogical and the corpus linguistic dimensions are to be integrated with each other. As Chambers (in the volume reviewed) rightly observes, corpus linguistics is still a field largely restricted to certain academic circles and has not yet spread as widely as desired to those actually involved in teaching (which is not to deny the significant numbers of EFL practitioners attending TaLC conferences). It is my impression that most of the contributions depart from a corpus linguistic centre to see how the possibility of this method can be of practical use in language teaching and learning rather than from an analysis of language pedagogy and its problems in order to find which methods offer solutions to the latter. Although this may just be an abstract characterization of the status quo of TaLC, it concretely shows in some articles (here and elsewhere), particularly in what I call the “Do this in class! ” approach: the pedagogicalization (in this context regularly appended to the article in a chapter entitled “Pedagogical implications”) of often very good, thoroughly conducted and highly relevant corpus linguistic research amounts to - overstating the point a bit - saying that students should do this kind of analyses themselves because the results are interesting and could thus benefit their foreign language competence. I do not doubt or question these implications, but my point is that this approach suggests that corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning - or any other form of teaching and learning - are two independent modules with the former feeding into the latter and that the interaction and the mutual benefits are not as extensive and substantial as might be assumed. Of course, there are also areas where these connections are shown more clearly, e.g. in the area of data-driven learning and in all learner corpus-based research. Even though this aspect has to be seriously discussed in the context of TaLC conferences and elsewhere, it does not - in my view - reduce the overall quality of the present volume, which I recommend to anyone interested in the applications of computer corpora in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. Georg Marko Institut für Anglistik Universität Graz