Uncorrected proofs -  John Benjamins Publishing Company Corpus research and practice What help do teachers need and what can we ofer? Ute Römer Despite the progress that has recently been made in the ield of corpus linguis- tics and language teaching, it is not clear what impact corpora have actually had so far on English language teaching practice. Corpus researchers oten claim that corpus linguistics can make a diference for language teaching and that it has an immense potential to improve pedagogy, but perhaps do not focus enough on the interface of research and practice. hey do not make suicient eforts to reach practitioners, especially teachers, with the ‘corpus mission’, do not know enough about the needs of teachers, and do not show them where corpora can help them solve everyday problems. he present chapter aims to address these issues. It centres on a teachers’ needs analysis carried out to capture important aspects about the situation of teachers, their problems and wishes they might have. A questionnaire was devised that covered topics such as the quality of existing teaching materials, authenticity in language teaching, and the teachers’ language competence and exam marking. his chapter will present selected results from the teachers’ survey and discuss where corpus linguistics (or corpus linguists, rather) could, and should perhaps, ofer help to teachers, hence showing them that corpus research can have an impact on pedagogical practice and that corpora can actually make a diference. 1. Introduction: Research and practice here has recently been a lot of research activity in the ield of corpus linguis- tics and language teaching (see, for example, the contributions in Aston et al. (eds) 2004; Connor and Upton (eds) 2004; Kettemann and Marko (eds) 2002; and Sinclair (ed.) 2004). Some considerable progress has unquestionably been made in providing corpus-based descriptions of the language for learners and of the language of learners. Researchers in the TaLC (Teaching and Language Corpora) tradition, including myself, keep claiming that, taken seriously, corpus linguistics