This is an update on BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG activities for our members. We have 66 members at the moment and would welcome meeting any new or existing members at BAAL in Cork next week.

Events: You may have attended our seminar in Milton Keynes at the end of April on 'Text analysis using corpora - methodological issues' - you can read more about this at http://corpus-sig-baal.org.uk/ou_sem06.htm

Webpages: Please visit our SIG webpages at http://corpus-sig-baal.org.uk/index.htm . Our links page is under development and I would welcome any suggestions for corpus resources to add here. Any other suggestions or comments on the web pages would also be useful as they are there for you, our members.

BAAL 2006: The Corpus Linguistics SIG Committee extends a warm welcome to both existing and new members to the SIG meeting in Cork on Friday 8 Sept at lunchtime (see programme for venue). Please come along to find out what has been happening this year and to meet your Committee. Also at BAAL, look out for the Corpus Linguistics SIG strand (Thursday afternoon) and other corpus-informed papers throughout the event.

Discussion list: Don't forget to use the discussion list to keep in contact with your fellow SIG members. Send any postings to baal-corpus-sig@lists.reading.ac.uk or you can join the list or review your membership details at: http://www.lists.rdg.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/baal-corpus-sig

I look forward to meeting you in Cork.

Regards
Fiona Barker, Corpus Linguistics SIG Communications Secretary

The Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) is now soliciting manuscript proposals (500 words) for a special issue entitled 'Corpus-based EAP pedagogy'.

In 2000, the editors of the /English for Specific Purposes Journal/ (Volume 19, Issue 2) predicted that, 'although the successful use of corpora in classroom teaching of ESP work has been reported, it may well turn out that the most extensive and valuable use of computer-based corpora will be for ESP research purposes rather than for teaching purposes' (p. 98). The use of corpora in EAP research, as a source of texts for analysis, and of insights into language patterning in academic discourse certainly has grown steadily in the last two decades; in five issues of JEAP in 2005–6, for example, forty percent of the articles reported research that was largely corpus-based. The use of corpora in EAP pedagogy, however, has increased at a slower rate, and it may well be that the prediction of the ESPJ editors will prove true. The purpose of this special issue of JEAP is to assess the development of corpus-informed and corpus-based approaches to EAP pedagogies, and to highlight both issues and practice in the exploitation of corpora, by teachers and students, in EAP contexts.

This issue will encompass a range of papers relating to the uses of language corpora in EAP teaching, research and materials development, with the emphasis on applications to pedagogy. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

• the development of new resources for exploitation in EAP teaching, either in the form of data (corpora) or tools (query interfaces), at local, national or international levels; 
• survey of corpus-based research and pedagogic practice in a variety of EAP contexts; 
• the creation and investigation of small corpora by learners in EAP contexts; 
• empirical research into the contribution of corpora in direct teaching; 
• the uses of corpus findings in the development of EAP teaching materials.

Expected timeline for the special issue:

By 27 October, 2006: Five hundred-word proposals for articles to be submitted by email to the guest editor Paul Thompson (p.a.thompson@reading.ac.uk) 1 December, 2006: Responses to prospective authors to be provided 16 March, 2007: Completed articles should be submitted to guest editor 18 May, 2007: Decisions for acceptance by guest editor to be determined Final manuscript preparations/revisions to take place between mid-May and mid-June 2007

Submission guidelines are available from the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) website: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap 

For additional information, please contact Paul Thompson (p.a.thompson@reading.ac.uk).

Deadline 27 October 2006