Corpora in Language for Specific Purposes Research

Abstract

Among the various approaches that are often used to study language for specific purposes (LSP), those focusing on the analysis of the genres used by the target discourse communities have attracted a high degree of attention in the last decade. The members of different discourse communities develop specific communicative practices and conventions to communicate with one another and with other communities. Language learners who need to acculturate to a new community that uses a specific language type need to become aware of the forms of discourse used by those communities. For many decades, the description of these discourses was done by analyzing a single text or a very limited number of texts, in an attempt to provide language learners with a framework of reference for the acquisition of this specific language and to help materials designers develop materials that could be used for the teaching of LSP. With the advancements in computer technology and the collection of language corpora (large collections of machine‐readable language texts) that have been taking place in the past two decades, the use of recurrent features of language that mark the tendencies of a discourse community can now be easily identified and analyzed. Technology now allows for the collection and storage of hundreds of thousands or millions of texts that provide data to describe language in detail, basing that language description on empirical findings instead of mere intuition.

Comparing research articles in pulmonology and other disciplines

“…Discipline-specific academic writing has been a widely studied area of applied linguistics research (see for example, Ferris, 1994;Grant & Ginther, 2000;Gray, 2013), and corpus-based research has been an effective way to find characteristic features and trends in academic writing that have useful pedagogical implications (Conrad, 1999;Cortes, 2013;Rӧmer et al, 2020). Various approaches to exploring academic writing corpora have been used over the years, some analyzing the overall organization of texts, and others examining smaller units within holistic texts (Biber et al, 2007).…”

Arabic as a Language of Politics: A Case Study in Corpus-based Teaching

“…Academic research on the use of corpora as a support for teaching activities and teaching tools has developed considerably for English as well as for other European language, especially since the late 1980s (for example Wichmann et al 1997;Knowles et al 1998;Bernardini 2000; Marco Aurelio Golfetto Hunston 2002;Sinclair 2004;Römer 2005;O'Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter 2007a;Harris and Jaén 2010;Reppen 2010;Flowerdew 2012;Friginal 2018; Zaki 2021 1 ). In this sense, specific attention has also subsequently been devoted to ESP (for example Bowker 2002;Gavioli 2005;O'Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter 2007b;Fuertes-Olivera 2008;Cortes 2012;Hou 2014;Legallois and Prunet 2015;Berber Sardinha 2016).…”