Language and computers: New directions in language research and teaching

This study examines the advent of the computer in language research and teaching to show how the linguistic research communities in multilingual settings like Nigeria stand to benefit from the engineering of language. The paper argues that researchers and teachers need to revise their methods in line with current but proven trends for better and valid results to occur. This entails taking advantage of the triple resource which the computer, the corpus and the access software provide, and adding to it the human intelligence. Using the argumentation method, the paper delves into the pros and cons of the use of the computer in language research and teaching and then makes a case for computer assisted language study because of the cross fertilisation of ideas which comes with it. The position of the paper is that the computer is a more recent direction in language research, one whose gains far surpass its losses.