Corpus Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition

"Corpus linguistics is one of the fastest-growing areas of second language acquisition research. In this timely and compelling overview, Xiaofei Lu shows us why. He illustrates the use of native and learner corpora as objective, sharable evidence of patterns of language uniformity, variation, and growth, and he explains the methods, measures, and tools for analyzing corpus data. An excellent source for researchers and students alike."

Nick Ellis, University of Michigan, USA

"This book is a must-read for both beginning and experienced researchers who are interested in corpus-based explorations of second language acquisition. It offers a comprehensive and accessible review and discussion on a wealth of carefully chosen topics that may help unravel the mysteries of second language acquisition."

Lei Lei, Professor of Applied Linguistics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

"This volume is an excellent resource for those who want to apply corpus methods to the study of second language acquisition. Importantly, the text covers both relevant theoretical constructs (from a range of perspectives) and ways in which these theoretical constructs have and can be operationalized when studying learner language. This book is a must read for SLA researchers, and I look forward to using it in both graduate classes devoted to SLA more generally and those that focus on learner corpus research."

Kristopher Kyle, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Oregon, USA

"This book differs from the existing literature in its unified theoretical and practical perspective, which incorporates
relevant theoretical constructs and ways how the researchers can operationalize the constructs when studying learner language in four core areas of inquiry. It is an excellent resource for corpus-based SLA research. The relationship between SLA and corpus linguistics requires a framework. By describing usage-based approaches and the development of second language constructions, Lu provides valuable and accessible instructions to various learner language corpora and programs available for analyzing these corpora. This includes Lu's own Syntactic Complexity Analyzer. The issues and analytical measures described in the book are essential for researchers to comprehend current and future SLA and task variation research. For second language acquisition researchers and teachers with varying degrees of familiarity with these theories, this is a must-read book."

Qiuying Zhao, Associate Professor and Doctoral Candidate, Xi'an International Studies University, China.