Construction Grammar offers several assets that foster the learning and teaching of foreign languages. The constructionist approach focuses on well-entrenched form–meaning mappings of different degrees of complexity and abstraction. Thus, if learners have acquired the syntax and semantics of specific foreign constructions, they should be able to understand the semantic motivation behind the syntactic forms and infer the meaning of new instantiations. Moreover – an economical principle in the learning process – these units can be learned as part of a network of semantically related constructions. In learning L2-constructions, construction-based teaching strategies can be implemented, that is, the scaffolding strategy, structural priming and embodied construction practice. The scaffolding strategy elaborates on the semantic link between constructions of different degrees of syntactic complexity and on the family resemblance concept. Structural priming focuses on the creative repetition of similar structures with different slot-fillers. Finally, embodied practice applies to constructions referring to concrete events which can be represented with pictures or objects or can be enacted.

Framenets and constructiCons are applied instantiations of the linguistic frameworks known as Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, respectively, in the form of computational, semiformally structured linguistic resources. The resources have a common history, both theoretically and in design: They are built as English-language resources in the framework of the Berkeley FrameNet initiative. They enjoy the double nature of being descriptive linguistic resources as well as finding frequent use in a computational linguistic context, where they have been used both in NLP applications and as underlying knowledge bases in areas such as computer-assisted language learning. The chapter provides a bird’s-eye view on these resources: their theoretical foundations; design principles and how they are compiled; theoretical and methodological interrelations; the challenges involved in building framenets and constructiCons for new languages and for cross-linguistic application; the differences and interactions between linguistic and computational linguistic work on framenets and constructiCons; application to language pedagogy; and outstanding theoretical and methodological issues.

This is a chapter about ‘applications’, specifically the application of corpus linguistics to language learning and teaching. The chapter highlights the input of corpus research into reference materials for learners, including a proposal for a novel ‘constructicon’. It then discusses research using learner corpora, with advice on building a learner corpus and exploiting it to gain information on grammatical development and on vocabulary and collocation. Applications of corpus research to the study of discoursal or pragmatic features such as signalling nouns and stance expressions are then discussed. Finally, there is a discussion of the notion of complexity in learner language. The final part of the chapter discusses the issue of language learners using corpora directly. Research in this area is described, as are some of the materials – software and books – specifically designed to enable learners to gain information from a corpus, especially in the area of academic discourse.