How can corpora be used to explore the language of poetry and drama?

This chapter describes that an internet survey of a random sample of ten general MA programmes in ELT/TESOL/TEFL in both the UK and the US at the time of writing revealed that only three of them make any direct reference to corpus linguistics in their syllabus description literature. Language teacher educators have an additional responsibility because of the double-edged influence of our actions as well as our words. Student teachers can explore corpora at their own pace and with their own hypotheses for investigation, and on the journey to discovering some of the answers they may also serendipitously uncover further interesting examples of language use. In the context of teacher education for teaching French at secondary school, Chambers and O’Riordan report on ways in which student teachers make use of a number of small purpose-built corpora of classroom interactions including recordings of both native and non-native speaker teachers of French in Ireland, France and Belgium.