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Despite the progress made in the field of corpus linguistics, the use of corpora is relatively scarce in language pedagogy (Krieger 2003). However, the effectiveness of using corpus-based activities in teaching English has been supported by researchers (Vannestal and Lindquist, 2007). This paper discusses the potential of using corpora and corpus-based activities in TEFL settings, particularly in teaching collocations (i.e.. habitual, cooccurrences of lexical items). Corpora bring authentic English into the TEFL classrooms and, at the same time, validate autonomous learning. Corpora ‘allow access to detailed and quantifiable syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information about the behaviour of lexical items’ (Carter 1998: 233) and also provide learners with the situational contexts in which these lexical items typically occur. There is consensus that the study of collocations is vital for developing language skills and fostering fluency and accuracy (e.g. Biber et al., 1999; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; McAlpine & Myles, 2003) since competence in a language undoubtedly involves collocational knowledge (Herbst, 1996: 389). Evidently, learners’ knowledge of collocations is quite important (Kita and Ogata, 1997: 230) and is needed for effective sentence generation (Smadja and McKeown, 1990) and avoidance of errors (McAlpine and Myles, 2003: 75). In this paper, we argue that involving learners in corpus-based activities in the study of collocations would promote the development of some basic skills for lifelong learning. Such activities encourage learners to be active, to practice their deductive skills and to apply their critical thinking to the study of vocabulary. To support this argument, the researcher initiated an experiment involving learner-centred corpus analysis in the Police Science Academy (Sharjah, UAE). 20 learners were introduced to the BNC web and were given a hands-on session on how to use the BNC. Then, learners were asked to look at the concordances of the most frequent 10 nouns in the BNC1, namely: ‘time’, ‘people’, ‘way’, ‘years’, ‘year’, ‘work’, ‘government’, ‘day’, ‘man’, and ‘world’; to decide which adjectives most frequently occur with these nouns; and to discuss their findings with their colleagues. This is followed by a number of exercises (ex. fill in the gaps) in which learners use the collocates they have found. The aim of the. study, or as Chambers (2007) and Mukherjee (2004) call it ‘task’, is to ‘popularise’ the work with corpus data in TEFL settings. Hence, language learners would not rely on the teacher but would deal with corpora on their own and find out about language patterning and the behaviour of words and phrases in an ‘autonomous’ way (Bernardini, 2002:165).
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