Corpus-based resources for L 1 and L 2 teaching of Czech

Applications of corpus linguistics to language teaching began as early as the late eighties and nineties (e.g. Higgins 1988, Stevens 1991, J. Flowerdew 1993) and to this day, considerable amount of work has been done in this area, mostly in the second language acquisition and in teaching language for specific purposes. It is not surprising that it is English that has been in the centre of attention: as second language (ESL), as lingua franca (ELF), or as language for specific purposes (ESP). Currently, the learner corpora research is one of the most progressive areas of corpus linguistics (c.f. e.g. the ICLE1 project launched by Sylviane Granger and her colleagues at the University of Louvain). However, the research on corpora in language teaching seems to have rather neglected the idea of using corpora and corpus-based resources in L1 teaching, especially at primary and secondary school levels. To our knowledge, the CLLIP project (Sealey & Thompson 2004) employing a corpus-based approach to teach 810 year-olds and the web-based Englicious project 2 (developed by the team of Survey of English Usage, UCL) are one of the rare exceptions in the past few years. This paper aims to introduce our joint effort to a) provide a basis for a theoretical framework to using corpus-based teaching materials for Czech, both as L1 and L2, incl. the identification of specific needs of L1 and L2 learners, and b) to present sample activities of real-life application of corpus-based exercises at the secondary school level (L1) and in the foreign learners’ classroom (L2).