A Practical Corpus-based Approach to Teaching English for Tourism
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Title
A Practical Corpus-based Approach to Teaching English for TourismAuthor (s)
Date
2014-01Publisher
Australian International Academic CentreBibliographic citation
MARZÁ, Nuria Edo. A Practical Corpus-based Approach to Teaching English for Tourism. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2014, vol. 3, no 1, p. 129-136.Type
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Abstract
The benefits derived from the use of corpora in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) class seem out of question
nowadays despite being a challenging task both for teachers and learners. Learning through a corpus ... [+]
The benefits derived from the use of corpora in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) class seem out of question
nowadays despite being a challenging task both for teachers and learners. Learning through a corpus-based approach or
“data-driven learning” (DDL) (Johns 1986, 1994) allows students to get used to hands-on learning, thus promoting an
inquiry-based approach leading them to discover patterns in authentic language use and making them linguistic
researchers (Johns 2002) able to solve present and future linguistic needs of different nature with ease and autonomy.
Accordingly, the main aim of the research presented is twofold: firstly, to show the students of the ESP subject
“Introduction to English for Tourism” the multiple applications and benefits that the use of a specialised corpus may
have in the learning process of a foreign specialised language. With this aim, the 25 students who took part in the pilot
study reported were presented the COMETVAL1 corpus (Corpus Multilingüe de Turismo de la Universidad de
Valencia), a specialised multilingual and multi-genre data base on tourism. In this initial stage, a workshop with
different corpus activities was prepared to make students familiar with COMETVAL’s functioning, functionalities, and
possible future professional applications.
Secondly, students responded a questionnaire designed ad hoc to know their perceptions about the use of specialised
corpora in class –exemplified with COMETVAL’s workshop– and about their potential particular interest in devising,
compiling and exploiting a similar specialised corpus in and for the class both for teaching/learning and future
professional purposes.
Results show that students seem to feel positively motivated towards the use of corpora in class, specifically by the fact
of having direct access to real, non-biased language samples from different genres; they do also find frequency and
collocation-related data particularly interesting as well as linguistic patterns comparison between languages. In addition, students acknowledge the potential of autonomously relying on a specialised corpus for future professional queries. [-]
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International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, Vol. 3 No. 1; January 2014Rights
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