How can teachers use a corpus for their own research?

Practising language teachers engage in corpus research and other types of research for a variety of reasons. The general stimuli and specific motivators for their research may lie in challenges and/or opportunities in the immediate teaching and learning environment, may be based on personal or academic interests, may be stimulated by interaction with colleagues or be in response to research findings which have been released into the public domain. However, a unifying feature of such research, and one which is crucial to the profession of teaching as a whole, is professional curiosity. This chapter is specifically aimed at practitioners who are interested in conducting their own professional or pedagogical research and would like to explore the possibilities of using a corpus in this regard. Some samples of the directions that corpus research in language teaching have taken are presented before we turn our attention particularly to the language of the wider professional context, specifically the language used by teachers.