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Originally created to provide data for linguistic research, corpora are increasingly attracting the attention of researchers in applied linguistics. This study raises and discusses a number of issues concerning the consultation of a specialised corpus of research articles in French by teachers and writers (in both cases non-native speakers of French), writing essays, theses and research articles. A one-million word corpus of research articles in French (Chambers & Le Baron 2007) will be used as an example. After examining issues relating to the creation of the corpus and giving a brief account of publications on the use of corpora as a resource for writing, pedagogic applications of the corpus will be discussed, taking the use of the first person plural, nous, as an example. This will enable us to assess the potential of specialised corpora in language learning and teaching in general and, more particularly, in the learning and teaching of writing.