“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.
Filed under: Corpora, ESP, Research
I’ve come across an interesting journal: JoStrans, Journal of Specialized Translation. It may be of interest to ESP teachers.
I’ve recently learnt about Netvibes from a friend of mine, Saša. I just love it. I immediately made a Netvibes page, Tourism news from around the world, containing RSSs of tourism journals, travel magazines, travel sections of newspapers and tourism industry news. I hope my students will find it useful. My second Netvibes, Language Matters, is dedicated to linguistics. Linguistic journals seem to be slightly more slow at introducing RSS readers but with a little patience I’ll be able to add more RSSs soon. Welcome to visit it!
Filed under: ESP, Linguistics
I’ve been piloting a project during the past four days. Following Cobb (2003) who used essays written by TESL training programme applicants, I also asked my students (all of them in their first year at college) to write an essay in answer to the question “What difference would it make to your work or life if your English was significantly better than it is now?” They had 45 minutes for the task and were allowed to use dictionaries. After finishing their essays they were asked to fill out a questionnaire (a slightly expanded version of the ICLE questionnaire form Louvain).
Hopefully the results of the analysis will encourage other English teachers here in Slovenia to join me in the project and help build a larger learner corpus.
Filed under: Corpora, EFL, ESP
Arnold Zwicky form the Language Log points to an interesting op-ed text in the New York Times about the 50th anniversary of the Mad Libs word game. Mad Libs seem so similar to the word formation exercises we use in foreign language teaching – but without the fun that is so typical of the original word game.
I’ve never thought of the history of language exercises or exercises that are used for testing languages but it might be interesting to know how these were created, which word games they owe their origins to, etc. Perhaps knowing this would make us (language teachers) remember more often that language exercises are supposed to be fun too.
Filed under: EFL, ESP, Teaching , word games
The British Council has made some of the texts from the New Writing 15 anthology available for a limited-time download. Tpics range from languages, music, work and journeys to clothes, publica spaces and even writers thinking about writing. Lots of interesting and useful stuff that can come handy in next term’s classes.
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Filed under: EFL, ESP, Useful sites/links , materials design
