The handbook has three major parts. It begins with an introduction to the topic of corpus linguistics, intended to bring the substantial amount of corpusbased work already done in a variety of research areas to the non-specialist reader's attention. It also provides an outline description of the BNC itself. The bulk of the book however is concerned with the use of the SARA search program. This part consists of a series of detailed task descriptions which (it is hoped) will serve to teach the reader how to use SARA eVectively, and at the same time stimulate his or her interest in using the BNC. There are ten tasks, each of which introduces a new group of features of the software and of the corpus, of roughly increasing complexity. At the end of each task there are suggestions for further related work. The last part of the handbook gives a summary overview of the SARA program's commands and capabilities, intended for reference purposes, details of the main coding schemes used in the corpus, and a select bibliography