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The history of corpora can be traced back to the 18th century, and language corpora have made a tremendous impact on dictionary compilation and linguistic studies ever since then. Yet the invention of computers, especially microcomputers, revolutionized language corpora. Nowadays, the size of the corpora is larger; the types are ampler; and the construction principles become more sophisticated. With computerized corpora, language studies have become more scientific and convenient. Simultaneously, language corpora have been introduced into language classrooms. The concordances retrieved by the concordancer from the corpus offer learners the opportunity of data-driven learning (DDL), a new learning model characterized by authentic texts, inductive learning and learner autonomy. In the classroom, teachers can also employ concordances to apply corpus-informed teaching to grammar, vocabulary, culture and literature classes, as well as the second language acquisition research.On the basis of literature review of corpus- and concordance-assisted teaching and learning, the CNU EFL Corpus was built in the English Department of Capital Normal University, in order to fulfill the purpose of confirming the feasibility and the efficiency of the language corpus in the classroom teaching in China. This corpus was expected to create the environment for DDL and corpus-informed teaching, as well as to promote the reformation of the curriculum design. Based on these guidelines, the researcher designed the corpus in the framework of a database and established pedagogy-oriented parameters in the database. By the end of April 2001, three subcorpora - the Reading-Writing Corpus, the Short-Context Corpus and the Graded-Text Corpus - had been completed by the researcher, with approximately 600,000 words in total.While compiling the CNU EFL Corpus, the researcher also carried out an experiment in a corpus-assisted writing class. In general, the research findings have proved that the CNU EFL Corpus and its concordances can be effectively integrated into English writing class. Specially, the Corpus can produce positive influence on theprewriting activities and on the process of learners’ error correction at the revising and editing stage. Furthermore, on the basis of the experiment, the researcher has made some suggestions in regard to the future corpus-based studies in the language classroom.