This coursebook is the result of a long process of an investigation into issues in relation to corpus linguistics and corpus-based methodology. The coursebook aims at providing students with an overview to the main issues in corpus linguistics in general and the application of the tool options in a lexical analysis software package in particular. Students attending this course are expected to achieve outcomes of understanding on corpus linguistics and applying corpus-based methods into setting criteria in advance for selecting authentic texts for research; compiling a research corpus or corpora to characterize linguistic features in studying a particular type of English discourse; using a lexical analysis software to search for, collect and analyze data from the designed research corpus or corpora.

In the first three chapters of the coursebook, an overview of corpus linguistics and corpus-based methodology together with a lexical analysis software package are introduced and analyzed. In the next three chapters, results of research projects on English discourse analysis via the corpus-based methods are presented to reflect the advantages of this method in terms of authenticity and objectivity of the subject matters of research as guidelines to students for corpus-based research orientation.

Although the corpus-based approach has been employed in a wide range of language studies on discourse analysis in the world, it is still not a preferable method among the community of Vietnamese teachers and students in conducting research on English discourse. Moreover, there has been no study on a particular genre of English discourse using corpus-based methodology, nor has the domain of corpus linguistics been discussed in major research aspects of discourse analysis. Therefore, this coursebook is expected to contribute to the community of language study as a crucial reference on the application of corpus-based methodology to research on English discourse.

The coursebook is commenced with an introduction to the current tendency of corpus linguistics and corpus-based methodology in research on discourse analysis. Ways of collecting texts and principles in building a research corpus or corpora are presented and particular tools in the corpus-based methodology are described with the use of computational procedures and the use of a lexical analysis software. In this coursebook, the lexical analysis software of WordSmith is introduced as illustration for application of tools in conducting research with corpus-based methodology. This lexical analysis software is under the authority of Lexical Analysis Software Ltd.

Teachers and students are expected to get access to this authorized software package and learn the manual of how to use WordSmith tools and its conditions. As such, the procedures conducted in collecting sample texts to build research corpora for investigating particular issues of the English discourse and the major tools of Concord, Collocation, KeyWords and WordList are illustrated in the last three chapters as research practice. These chapters can be considered as the actual models for conducting corpus-based research. Such studies may be of interest for post-graduate students to adapt for the method of examining potential linguistic features and structures in their intended research on English discourse analysis.

Hopefully, post-graduate students will find the coursebook useful with the guidelines of a set of techniques available for their corpus-based approach to language research. The coursebook promises a helpful material for those who are interested in investigating and analyzing English discourse through data collected from real-life English language communication. The selection of authentic texts as the data source for the compilation of a research corpus or research corpora is central to direction of data collection for a corpus-based research project with the use of a particular lexical analysis software.