“Potentials and Challenges of ESP Learner Corpora: The Case of Modal Auxiliaries in Slovene ESP Learners’ Written Interlanguage” is the title of an article I wrote over a year ago. It was published in Inter Alia 1, the proceedings of a 2007 LSP conference I attended. The abstract is below and the article is available at the publication’s website.
ABSTRACT
A corpus-based approach to interlanguage analysis has been used for over a decade now and its impacts on foreign language teaching materials and teaching practices has been quite substantial. The approach, however, has rarely been used for studying ESP learners’ interlanguage. This paper therefore aims to address the potentials that a small ESP learner corpus can present to ESP teachers, and determine whether the resources available can at present support such an analysis. Based on a small corpus of ESP student essays, central modal auxiliaries were studied with a focus on overuse errors. The analysis revealed that providing a reliable explanation for students’ overuse errors is rather difficult given the existing corpus resources and that these are still too few in the fields of ESP. Nevertheless, the results can provide sufficient grounds for ESP teachers to adjust their teaching materials to their learners’ needs.
