Web Access to Corpora: the W3Corpora Project

In this day an age, some corpus linguistics should be par t of every course to do with language. But learning about corpus linguistics its possibilities a n d limitations is not just a mat te r of acquiring information. The best way to learn about corpus linguistics is to do it, and the best way to teach corpus linguistics is to put students into a position where they can do it ((Leech, 1997), (Fligelstone, 1993)). This requires corpora, and tools, in addition to teaching materials. For a number of reasons, the World Wide Web offers a good method for delivering this (see below). This paper will present a resource tha t enables students to get a general introduction to corpus linguistics via the Web. The resource is currently available for general use. See Table 1 for URLs. No very great claims will be made for the resource in terms of being highly original or visionary in style of interaction or implementation. On the contrary, the model of learning is rather traditional, and the approach taken was very simple and straightforward. However, this in itself may be interesting as providing a baseline against which more visionary approaches can be compared this is probably the simplest way one could go about providing Internet based education. In addition, some of the design decisions and lesson learned may be of interest. Section 2 presents the motivation for the project that produced the resource. Section 3 will give an