Abstract
Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC) conferences are now a well-established biennial event. TaLC began at the University of Lancaster sixteen years ago and, after being held there twice, and then successively at the universities of Oxford, Graz, Bologna, Granada, and Paris 7, we are delighted that, for the present occasion, we have been asked to bring the 8th Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC 8) conference to the Instituto Superior de Línguas e Administração in Portugal. The use of corpora in teaching has been growing steadily in the past couple of decades. This increased interest is reflected in the 110 proposals from 28 different countries that we received for TaLC 8. The present volume is a compilation of the 3 invited talks, 48 papers, 22 posters, 4 software demonstrations and 4 workshops that were finally presented at TaLC 8, Lisbon, between 3 and 6 July 2008. Just by looking at their titles, it is easy to see how diversified and widespread the domain of teaching and language corpora has become. We have presentations about teaching advanced learners as well as beginners, and this includes university students, school children and even pre-schoolers. If in the beginning corpora was used mainly to teach English, on this occasion we also have presentations that draw on corpora of Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Ukranian, Persian, Japanese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian and Romanian. And it is not just different languages that are represented here, but also different types of languages: academic discourse, classroom discourse, youth language, learner language, translated language and even the discourse of diplomacy and of subtitles. Whereas corpora used to be mostly about the written medium, in TaLC 8 there is no shortage of presentations about corpora and speech. In addition to grammar and lexis, many of the papers in these proceedings are about phraseology, translation, literature and culture. Another point to be made is that this conference is not just about putting existing corpora to use in the classroom, but also about compiling different types of corpora for teaching, exploring novel types of pedagogical tagging, developing accessible corpus tools for education, using corpora for language assessment and training novice users how to use corpora. Of course, not everyone needs to learn how to use corpora. We have here both presentations that focus on the direct use of corpora by learners and presentations about developing data-driven materials which people who have never heard of corpora can benefit from. The content of this volume is also a measure of the direction in which we are heading. It is perfectly clear that language corpora are not being used as an end in itself, but as a means of achieving different educational goals in different educational settings. Our common interest in corpora and teaching has brought together researchers, practitioners and theorists in an unprecedented way. It is not just a question of establishing links with delegates from different countries. TaLC is an opportunity for corpus compilers to meet corpus users, for people developing corpus tools to exchange ideas with people developing corpus-based materials and people using corpora directly in the classroom. It is a chance for researchers working with written corpora to meet those working with spoken corpora, for teachers using corpora of one particular language to talk to teachers using corpora of other languages, for people interested in teaching literature to meet people interested in error analysis. These proceedings are a reflection of the fruitful exchange of ideas that will have taken place during TaLC 2008.