This chapter outlines the state of the art in corpus-based language teaching and digital pedagogy, focusing on the differences between using corpora with present-day and historical data. The basic concepts of corpus-based research such as representativeness, frequency, and statistical significance can be introduced to students who are new to corpus methods, and the application of these concepts to the history of English can deepen students’ understanding of how historical varieties of the language are researched. This chapter will also address some of the key challenges particular to teaching the history of English using corpora, such as dealing with the seemingly counterintuitive findings, non-standard features, and small datasets. Finally, following an overview of available historical corpora and corpus tools, several practical examples of corpus-driven activities will be discussed in detail, with suggestions and ideas on how a teacher might prepare and run corpus-based lessons.
Grassroots innovation: The state of the art and future perspectives
