For over thirty years corpus linguists have been discussing the applicability of corpora to
language teaching. While their use in compiling dictionaries and shaping teaching materials has
been promoted and celebrated, using corpora directly in the classroom has been propagated by
some but rejected, or even ignored, by many. Those who have conducted research into such
direct use of corpora have tended to select postgraduate students who have an intrinsic interest
in language or linguistics. The results of such research have invariably been rather positive. This
study aims to examine the application of one corpus at undergraduate level with students whose
focus is on the more general area of business and establish whether similarly positive results are
to be observed. The results of which indicate that the majority of participants benefited from the
experience and valued their corpus activity. There was, however, some criticism concerning
navigating the British National Corpus (BNC) and the time-consuming nature of corpus work.
The diverse nature of students’ performances reflects the wide range of student responses to
engaging with corpus. The student’ attitudes indicate that an active guiding role by the teacher
may significantly improve the quality of such learners’ involvement with corpora.