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Should we teach from materials developed with corpus linguistics?

Richards, Kendall; Pilcher, Nick

Authors

Kendall Richards



Abstract

In our presentation for the IATEFL ESP-SIG in Athens our intention was to create ‘wobble’ and genuine dialogue around the issue of the importance of ‘context’ in relation to corpus linguistics. We believe we failed to achieve this, as illustrated by the questions asked at the end of the presentation. Subsequently, in this paper we approach the creation of dialogue differently. We first detail our backgrounds as lecturers and researchers in academic support, and our research into the ‘English’ students need to succeed. We also detail the questions we were asked at the end of the presentation and why we believe these illustrate our failure to create dialogue. Following this introduction, we outline theories underpinning our ideas of viewing language as an individual subjectivist entity and the importance of this to how we view context in language meaning. We argue for the importance of considering what ‘context’ is and how we must strive to achieve ‘context’, in particular when using corpus based techniques. We then detail our method and present and discuss our key findings. Throughout, we focus on the generation of questions we believe will create genuine dialogue around the issue of ‘context’ in relation to language and corpus-based techniques, and conclude by gathering these together and outlining why we feel these questions are of importance to ESP and EAP materials development and helping students with their studies.

Citation

Richards, K., & Pilcher, N. (2017). Should we teach from materials developed with corpus linguistics?. English for Specific Purposes Special Interest Group Journal,

Journal Article Type Conference Paper
Acceptance Date Jul 3, 2017
Online Publication Date Oct 13, 2017
Publication Date Oct 13, 2017
Deposit Date Jul 11, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal English for Specific Purposes Special Interest Group Journal
Print ISSN 1754 - 6850
Publisher International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Languages
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Keywords Corpus Linguistics, ESP, EAP materials development,
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/960195