Week 2: Exploring corpus linguistics in EAP
Introduction
You’ve probably seen word clouds like the one above before. They’re often used in newspapers and in social media as illustrations. This one was generated using a free word cloud generator (Generate Word Cloud) by inputting some of the most important content words from this week’s study. Take a moment to pause and consider what you expect this week to cover, based on its title, and the word cloud (note that words with a larger font are those which appear more frequently).
From this week’s title, you know this is about corpus linguistics – or the study of language using a large collection of texts (a corpus) organised in a systematic way and stored digitally (you first encountered the term ‘corpus’ in Week 1). You may or may not be familiar with the term EAP in the title, but from the word cloud you may have worked out that this stands for English for Academic Purposes. Other words such as ‘teaching’ and ‘students’ and ‘class’ might seem an obvious fit here, but you may be wondering why ‘pronouns’ features. This will become clear as the week progresses.
This week you’ll explore how language analysis can be taught in a classroom using corpus linguistics as a tool. First you’ll watch a short video in which a teacher of EAP uses corpora (more than one corpus) based on the students’ academic discipline areas to engage them in exploring language. You’ll hear views from individual students in the class, and you’ll listen to an interview with the teacher – Dr Maggie Charles – in which she reflects on aspects of the class and also explains how her use of corpus linguistics supports her teaching.
By the end of this week, you should be able to:
- understand more around the role of an EAP teacher
- see how language analysis can be helped by corpus linguistics
- understand how pronouns are used in essays.
First, you’ll look at what the term ‘EAP’ covers alongside some of the other, similar terms in use today.