Computer corpora and authentic texts: Toward more effective language teaching

Teachers of language have turned to authentic texts to improve the communic ative competence of their students. Traditional sources, including curricul um materials, categorical book lists, teachers' prior knowledge of texts, a nd lists of graded texts using readability formulas, are incomplete in toda y's technological world. Computer corpora could provide additional sources of authentic texts. This article examines a variety of teaching implication s in using existing corpora and explores the need to develop additional cor pora and databases.