Besides teaching, managing their classrooms, and assessing learners, teachers also take care of their own development, sometimes with the support of their workplace institutions or professional associations. This chapter presents cases that offer opportunities to examine a variety of teacher professional development types including doing a PhD part-time, conducting workshops for teacher colleagues, and going on a short-term study-abroad exchange.

This chapter discusses corpus applications to language teaching and learning, focusing specifically on the use of corpora and corpus linguistics research for informing coursebook and assessment development. A number of studies undertaken by the authors are discussed with a view to highlighting both the affordances of corpus linguistics for supporting such indirect applications to language education, as well as the barriers of using corpus linguistics research to inform stakeholder practices. Focusing on the use of corpora by materials writers, the use of learner corpus research and spoken corpus research for assessment refinement and design, and the use of corpus research for materials design, this chapter reflects on engagement with stakeholders in this domain over the last fifteen years. Drawing together the lessons learned from these studies, this chapter offers a critical reflection on the relative impact achieved in each study, while also proposing guidelines for those interested in working with stakeholders to co-design research and produce relevant and appliable research.

As teachers go about their work of teaching in classrooms, doing research, and performing leadership duties, their psychological and emotional wellbeing is constantly under pressure in the workplace. This final chapter presents cases where wellbeing dilemmas are exposed. It includes a teacher educator who is under pressure from management to retire, a teacher coping with a heavy post-study abroad workload, and a teacher having to deal with students’ complaints.

This chapter will analyse and reflect upon the generation of impact from a learner corpus study of children’s writing. The study investigated how school students’ use of grammar and vocabulary develops through the course of their academic careers, from age five to sixteen. Findings had evident impact for the teaching writing across all age groups and disciplines. Specifically, they provided evidence which we used to (a) increase professional understanding of the characteristics of syntactic and vocabulary development in writing; and (b) develop professional practice in the teaching of writing. In the chapter, we first summarise previous relevant research on writing development before describing our own study, its key findings, and their implications for teaching practice. We then discuss how we reached a variety of education professionals in the UK and beyond. We emphasise in particular the key concrete steps in generating impact through workshops, online media, and professional publications, and we discuss the importance of partnerships with diverse stakeholders. Finally, we reflect on some of the challenges associated with developing impact from education research, particularly with regard to the ethics of working with government bodies and the difficulties of evaluating impact on educational practice.

This Facilitator Guide suggests ways in which the case components can be used. Merseth (1996) states that in the case method, the facilitator “plays a very important role – guiding, probing, directing, giving feedback or sometimes simply observing the exchanges and contributions among the class members” (p. 727). The Guide first addresses general facilitator guidelines that apply to the use of this casebook in all types of teacher education and professional development (PD) situations where the casebook is used. “Facilitator” in this section means a teacher educator working in an institution, a teacher trainer, or a facilitator of continuing PD workshops. These broad guidelines are followed by more specific suggestions for using the case components (a) in classroom or workshop discussions, (b) in online discussions, (c) for assignments, and (d) for the purposes of research.

This chapter describes ongoing corpus-based research on representations of Islam in the British press. The study involved building large corpora of newspaper articles about Islam and/or Muslims and using techniques like collocation and keywords to identify patterns of representation as well as differences between newspapers and change over time. The chapter outlines some of the key findings of the research as well as describing the various impact activities that were carried, and the challenges these presented. This includes working with a number of groups (ENGAGE, MEND, the Centre for Media Monitoring), presenting our work at the Labour Party Conference and in Parliament, as well as giving talks in mosques. We also detail how our project resulted in the creation of additional collections of newer corpora, enabling further examination of how representations have changed over time.

This chapter sets the scene for the volume by exploring the application of corpus linguistics across established and emerging contexts, examining its evolving role and methodological innovations both within the academy and beyond it. It discusses how corpus linguistics has expanded from foundational work in language pedagogy to address interdisciplinary needs, including social justice initiatives and policy influence. The chapter highlights diverse perspectives on what it means to ‘apply’ corpus linguistics, noting that this notion is shaped by the various cultural, institutional, and disciplinary contexts in which it is taken up. The chapter emphasises the importance of engaging with stakeholders and adapting corpus methods to new domains, from education to media and law enforcement, aiming to achieve social impact through research. Additionally, it reflects on the relational, social, methodological, and institutional dimensions that characterise the practical application of corpus linguistics today. The authors call for critical reflection on these dimensions to inform future applications, ultimately positioning corpus linguistics as a versatile and impactful methodology and field for addressing complex linguistic, professional, and societal challenges.

Thirty years since Johns (1990) coined the term ‘data-driven learning’ (DDL) to describe direct engagement with language corpus data, tools, and techniques for pedagogical purposes, DDL has become a popular area of applied corpus linguistics. However, one issue with the majority of DDL studies to date stems from a lack of focus outside of tertiary education. This leads to the applied linguist always being the main stakeholder, rather than teachers or indeed the students or institutions, and we currently have little information regarding how in-service teachers fare with DDL when the applied linguist is not in the room. This chapter presents two case studies exploring the experiences of four secondary school teachers who help to implement two different DDL interventions, one focusing on English as an additional language, the other focusing on DDL for science research report writing. Importantly for both cases, while an applied linguist developed the DDL activities, the teachers carried out many of the activities in class without the applied linguist present. Data is comprised of detailed individual interviews, coded and categorised into themes. The findings shed light on how DDL is perceived by subject content teachers when they are responsible for carrying out the intervention and provide an honest appraisal of the potential applications and impact of DDL when carried out by a non-linguist.

This Afterword discusses the chapters presented in the volume. It argues that by aligning corpus linguistics research with societal needs and ethical considerations, experts in the field can make significant contributions to addressing global challenges, shaping future research priorities. The Afterword underscores the practical applications of corpus research methods, demonstrating how corpus linguists’ work can effectively tackle social issues of interest outside the academic sphere. The afterword looks at how shaping policy decisions and fostering a culture of knowledge exchange and collaboration both within academia and beyond can enhance the visibility and applicability of the field.

In this chapter, we take the perspective of the sociology of language, focusing first on language maintenance and shift in historical settings. We then expand the discussion to include issues of language vitality and of reversing language shift, based on examples for seventeenth-century Dunkirk and twentieth-century Constantinople. A more general perspective of language policy and planning is subsequently developed, including crucial notions such as status planning, corpus planning and language-in-education planning. Examples and case studies are taken from a variety of languages, including Hebrew and Dutch. The Dutch case also serves to illustrate language planning at the level of the nation, and as a function of historical nationalism. The final part of the chapter addresses isssues such as language conflict, the invisibilisation of languages, both in discourse and in practice, and linguistic genocide. We discuss examples from the Habsburg Empire, Belgium, the German–Danish–Frisian area and the Menominee people in Wisconsin.

In this chapter, we focus on the meso- and micro-levels of social organisation, below the macro-levels discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. We first discuss social network theory, including crucial concepts such as ties, density and multiplexity, and explain the relationship with innovation diffusion and norm enforcement. We then explore to what extent social network theory can be applied to historical situations, distinguishing between functional and emotional ties. Examples and case studies of historical network studies are taken from English and Afrikaans. The chapter also discusses related models such as coalitions and communities, in particular, communities of practice, text communities and discourse communities. The final part of the chapter addresses individual variation and style shifting on the basis of examples from English and German data.

In this chapter, we elaborate on the sociolinguistic theory introduced in Chapter 1, focusing on variationist approaches that correlate language and society. We introduce the theory of language change developed by Weinreich et al. (1968), which encompasses the contraints problem, the transition problem, the embedding problem, the evaluation problem and the actuation problem. We then discuss social macro-categories such as social rank, gender, age and generations, arguing that detailed sociohistorical evidence is needed for establishing these categories in order to prevent an anachronistic approach to sociolinguistic history. Literacy, education and writing experience are discussed as highly relevant social factors for the sociolinguistic analysis of linguistic history. Case studies are taken from French and Dutch. The chapter ends by describing the variationist approach as the first of three waves of sociolinguistics.

This chapter introduces the theory of sociolinguistics using concepts such as variation, inherent variability, social meaning, real and apparent time, and the S-curve. We argue for the importance of a sociolinguistic approach to language history, and introduce key concepts used in historical sociolinguistics such as literacy and the bad data problem. We also dicuss the need for sociohistorical baseline evidence to reconstruct social orders and hierarchies in the past. Two case studies are discussed, which illustrate the applicability of sociolinguistic theories and methods to historical data by demonstrating the social embedding of ongoing changes in historical English, and the role of social mobility and social aspirers in these changes.

This chapter first discusses to what extent we can find attitudes in historical contexts. Whereas explicit attitudes can be culled from metalinguistic texts, implicit attitudes may be reconstructed on the basis of variation in language use, for example, in the use of pronouns versus full noun phrases. Such discursive patterns are signs of indexicality, which can be seen as the linguistic form of more intangible language ideologies. The chapter then introduces main concepts from language ideological theory, such as erasure and iconisation. Distinguishing between language myths and language ideologies, we discuss a range of examples, such as the myth of polite language and the standard language ideology. A number of case studies, including purism in the German metalinguistic tradition, linguistic debates about antiquity and ethnicity in Early Modern Spain, and the establishment of Luxembourgish as a national language, are used to further illustrate key concepts and approaches.

Traditional language histories have often focused narrowly on formal printed texts, produced by educated elite men from urban social elites, largely neglecting the everyday language practices of ordinary people. This chapter introduces the perspective of language history from below, where we shift our focus to these often-overlooked voices, in order to arrive at a fuller and more complete understanding of historical language variation and change. We discuss the challenges faced by investigations of the everyday language of ordinary people, including difficulties in determining actual authorship and interpreting texts produced through delegated writing. Based on case studies and examples from a range of different historical and linguistic contexts, we show how examining ego-documents such as private letters and diaries from lower social ranks can reveal valuable insights and complement and at times even correct our existing view of language histories.