The idea of corpus linguistics is related with the nature of its occurrence and application. Historically, it existed since 1950’s during the period of Chomskians (grammarians); it is neither a theory of linguistics nor a branch of linguistics rather it is a methodology. It is defined as an authentic spoken and written data or a mix of both that assembled according to explicit design criteria and exploited through user friendly software (Babanoglu, 2013; Nesselhauf, 2005; O’Keeffe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007). Similarly, Granger (2002, p, 4) defines corpus as “a methodology which is found on the use of electronic collections of naturally occurring texts.” It is also one of the outcomes of the advancement of technology in language study, and language teaching. Through computer program analysis of large bodies of text, it supports language teaching and language analysis. It is large language database which is designed for specific linguistic or socio-pragmatic purposes (Flowerdew, 2012). Currently, corpora are designed with a distinct set of criteria to use for classroom pedagogy and language analysis (O’keeffe, et al., 2007). It has been widely recognized emerging language instruction tool to address language learners’ communicative language needs and to enhance their engagement (Yoon & Hirvela, 2004). This has been contributing a lot to teaching language skills, research, language analysis, classroom pedagogy, language testing, and material design.

Review The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, was edited by Anne O’Keeffe and Michael McCarthy and published in 2010 by Routledge. It encompasses 45 individual chapters and organized into eight major sections. The hand book was contributed by 52 researchers. It raises one of current and rapidly growing issue in language teaching and language analysis and approached with clear theoretical and applied methodology. This hand book addresses the historical and theoretical over view of corpus linguistics, the key considerations in building and designing a corpus, basics to analysis the corpus, using a corpus for language research, using corpus for language pedagogy and methodology, designing corpus-based materials for the language classroom, using corpora to study literature and translation, and applying corpus to other areas of research.