Abstract
This presentation seeks to provide insights into the use of learner corpora in second language teaching and learning activities. If native corpora are invaluable resources providing empirical evidence of authentic native language use (McEnery et al. 2006), learner corpora are able to document real language use from learners themselves, and to provide vast amounts of authentic data, where teachers and learners can detect the most frequently occurring patterns, as well as the most frequently occurring features distinguishing native and non-native uses (Granger 1996; 2015). I will discuss how learner corpora can be considered as resources at the interface between (learner corpus) research and language teaching: on the one hand, they are the tools used by researchers to extract relevant data in order to analyse the ways in which second language
acquisition takes place; on the other hand, they offer teachers and learners the possibility of identifying and analysing specific areas of difficulty for learners. In this sense, the use of learner corpora in a language class can be viewed not only as a teaching methodology, but also as a way of bridging the gap between second language research and language teaching.
I will then explore the requirements learner corpora have to satisfy in order to be learner-friendly (Forti & Spina 2019), that is usable by learners in a language class. Finally, by referring to the Italian context, where the use of corpora in language teaching is scarcely widespread (Forti 2023), I will briefly describe examples of how research findings stemming from Learner corpus research can inform the development of DDL pedagogical activities.