The contributions to this volume offer a broad range of novel insights about data-based or data-driven approaches to the study of both structure and function of language, reflecting the increasing shift towards corpus-based methods of analysis in a wide range of areas in linguistics. Corpora can be used as models of human linguistic experience, and the contributors demonstrate that there is ample scope for integrating such models into the descriptions of discourse, grammar, and meaning. Continually improving technological development facilitates the design of larger and more comprehensive corpora documenting language use in a multitude of genres, styles and modes, even starting to include visual aspects. Software to investigate these data also becomes increasingly powerful and more refined.

As is widely accepted, language learning success is best predicted by two factors: learners’ aptitude and motivation.
As teachers are key stakeholders in shaping learners’ motivation, they play the major part in the foreign language education game.
Although no chapter discusses teacher education explicitly, the implications from these studies are hoped to be obvious and relevant.

This book, focused on corpus planning in language policy, provides a broad, integrative framework and also discusses multiple languages in detail. It provides readers with great familiarity with a wide range of language cases and at the same time gives them the theoretical tools and analysis to see how they inter-relate. The novelty of this volume is twofold: First, it deals with corpus planning alone (modernizing a language per se), and second, it does so in terms of a systematization of the often unconscious language status aspirations that both guide language planners themselves and motivate the lay public (the target population of all language planning). Corpus planning is going on all over the world today and inevitably becomes an expression of the societal goals, ideologies, and aspirations of the societies and cultures that support it. The implication is that the distinction between corpus and status planning, which has a long tradition in language planning research, must be critically re-examined.

Linguistic Informatics is a research field named by the Center of Excellence (COE) Program: Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI), which aims to systematically integrate studies in computer science, linguistics, and language education. The first part of this volume contains three lectures on spoken language analysis and corpus linguistics delivered at the Second International Conference on Linguistic Informatics held on December 10, 2005. The nine contributions in the second part come from the Collaboration Workshop on spoken language corpora between UBLI and C-ORAL-ROM, a consortium researching the spoken Romance languages. In the third part, four studies representative of Linguistic Informatics are presented. These studies deal with (1) Corpus-based analysis of linguistic usages, (2) Typological study of different languages, (3) Effective integration of e-learning and task-based face-to-face teaching and (4) Fosterage of language education researchers with expertise in the field of Linguistic Informatics.

THIS IS NOT AN IT BOOK. It is based in the centre of a wide field of modern research. In my opinion the articles presented here are placed fully within the scope of Englishtips more advanced linguistic students, language researchers and  especially teachers - stovokor