Corpus-based learning activities

If students have been familiarized with the basics of corpus methodology, with careful guidance they can be encouraged to use BSLC themselves.¹ As a beginning task, students could be given some sets of concordance lines generated from specialized lexical items, but with the search word blanked out. They could then be asked to complete the concordances appropriately choosing from a list of options. To increase awareness of collocations and colligations, students could also be presented with com-plete concordances and asked to study and identify patterns in the items that surround the specialized lexis. For example, a few concordances of fund (see below) could help students discover its usage as both a noun and a verb, common collocations/colligations and especially the impor-tant noun + noun pattern often found in business English (e.g. capital

104 Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching

fund and retirement fund).

N Concordance

1 und they created a regional venture capital fund together with some 2 w it’s too risky the what the banks want to fund uh is large companies 3 d to take them under government control to fund them and restructure t 4 blah blah blah and he says you own a mutual fund? Yeah I’ve got a 5 n a mutual fund? Yeah I’ve got a retirement fund I’ve got a mutual fund 6 bad corporations If they have a retirement fund and insurance policy 7 they own any stock or if they own a mutual fund I love to- I love to t 8 a link between him and uh uh that endowment fund that he and his wife put

As a more advanced discovery-driven task, students could be asked to generate a wordlist of one lecture and then decide for themselves which items are specialized or not. Some interesting discussion is likely to emerge as they justify their choices. They could also carry out follow-up concor-dancing and cluster analysis of the items they selected to discover usage tendencies.

7.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have shown how a small specialized corpus can be analysed to determine its key discipline-related lexis and how these fi ndings can be developed into corpus-informed, corpus-based and corpus-driven activities to help EBS students better understand content lectures in English. Because the language used by business studies lecturers represents a merger of the academic, disciplinary and professional worlds (Crawford Camiciottoli 2007: 190), the ability to understand these lectures is crucially important not only for the learners’ more immediate academic needs, but also for their future careers.

With this study focusing on a particularly popular area of language study (i.e. business English), I hope to have made a contribution towards bridg-ing the gap between ESP research and ESP pedagogy. ESP is destined to play an increasingly vital role in language teaching due to the growing demand for professionals with specialized knowledge and skills. Indeed, in today’s globalized workplace the possession of multiple specializations has become an important advantage for job candidates (Crawford Camiciottoli 2007: 1). For this reason, additional studies targeting corpus applications in other areas of ESP (e.g. legal English or technical English) would be extremely useful.

Notes

1 I agree with both Gavioli (2005: 29–30) and Fuentes and Rokowski (2003: 4) that students need to be guided and supervised by the teacher when learning to work with corpora and corpus tools in the classroom.

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Creating a Corpus of EIL Cross-Cultural