Specialized corpora on the base of teaching innovation in ESP.

  1. María del Camino Rea Rizzo
  2. Mª José Marín Pérez
Proceedings:
I Congreso Internacional de Innovación Docente. CIID

ISBN: 978-84-694-5332-2

Year of publication: 2011

Pages: 1887-1904

Congress: I Congreso Internacional de Innovación Docente. CIID : Cartagena 6, 7 y 8 de julio de 2011.

Type: Conference paper

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Abstract

The implementation of the Bologna Reform at Spanish universities has brought about major changes amongst which theuse of foreign languages has become a key issue within the concept of a European area of higher education. Moreover,the idea of internationalisation is one of the fundamental goals of the “Campus Mare Nostrum” integrated by theUniversities of Murcia and Cartagena. Henceforth, a language of communication is required to develop such concept in the fields of research and teaching and English appears to be the major vehicular language or lingua franca. This paperexplores the possibilities offered by specialised language corpora for the planning and elaboration of didactic materialsto teach English as a specialised language within the fields of Telecommunications Engineering and Law. Two specificcorpora will be studied: TEC (Telecommunication Engineering English Corpus) and BLaRC (British Law ReportCorpus) designed, compiled and analysed for research purposes. Special attention will be paid to such questions asfrequency rates or keyness, amongst others, as determining factors to identify the core vocabulary of both specialisedlanguages, a point of departure for the creation of new didactic materials.

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