Corpora and English Teaching: Retrospect and Prospect

As a whole system of methods and principles of how to apply corpora in language study, corpus linguistics has revolutionized nearly all branches of linguistics. In the wake of this revolution, people began to rethink language pedagogy from corpus perspective in early 1990s. However, Today, although Corpus Linguistics has contributed much to English education, difficulties do exist, especially in Chinese context, where in reality, there is big gap between the wealth of corpus linguistics and teaching practice. The present paper first takes a retrospective look at the current situation of the research on corpora and English teaching, and then sketches out the prospects for future research in the context of Chinese College English education.