Revisiting apprentice texts

Early developments in corpus linguistics were driven by the needs of those interested in the description of a language, whether as grammarians or lexicographers, not the needs of language teachers. This has hindered the development of corpus applications in language education, but work by Granger and others changed the situation and it is now accepted that learner data can be a valuable resource for those concerned with language education. Drawing on Biber’s (2006) account of lexical bundles, this chapter provides a practical example how the written production of postgraduate students in a single disciplinary area can be used to build an account of contrasts between apprentice and expert writing, and how this account can be used in the development of a course specification for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing.