Spanish corpora and their pedagogical uses: challenges and opportunities

While first-language (L1) corpora have been a key tool for linguistic research in Spanish, their use for pedagogical purposes is still limited, and more corpora are needed that document the varieties of Spanish used by learners or heritage speakers of the language. In this article, we provide an overview of the research that has already been carried out with available Spanish corpora and we propose avenues for further development of the areas where there is room for growth. As an introduction to this special issue, we also summarize the highlights of each of the six articles in this volume. Finally, we conclude with a call for collaboration among Spanish corpus researchers to address the current limitations when it comes to creating corpora that include oral and longitudinal data, that are more accessible, and more useful for daily use in classrooms of Spanish as a second, foreign or heritage language.