2The best-known treatment of this issue of corpus 'representativeness' is that ofBiber (1993).
3For example, an M.A. student I supervised at Lancaster recently, Kaori Shinohara,was able to obtain and make use of a large electronic corpus of authorized Englishlanguage learning materials published for high school use in Japan.
4I am grateful to Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing, and toPearson Educational, the publishers of Longman books, for permission to reprint this andsubsequent figures from LGSWE.
5It might be wondered what has happened to the combination of perfect andprogressive aspects ( e. g. What have you been doing?) in Figure 5. Perhaps surprisingly,the perfect progressive construction is too rare in the corpus to show up on the barchart.
6Biber, D. 1993, Representativenessin corpus design[J],Literary and Linguistic Computing 8: 243-257.
7Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad & E.Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammarof Spoken and Written English [M]. London: Longrnan.
8Carroll, J. B., P. Davies & B. Richman. 1971. The American Heritage WordFrequency Book [M].Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.
9Clark, H. H. & E.V. Clark. 1977. Psychology and Language: An Introduction toPsycholinguistics[M]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
10Ellis, R. 1994 The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
