Selecting Corpus-Based Grammatical Structures for ESP/EAP Materials

Abstract

Using corpus-based data to access authentic materials for instructional purposes has been receiving increasing attention in language education (Barnard R, Zemach D, Developing materials for language teaching. In: Tomlinson B (ed) Materials for specific purposes. Continuum, London, pp 306–323, 2003). However, despite considerable advancements in corpus-based vocabulary studies (Coxhead A, TESOL Q 34(2):213–238, 2000; TESOL Q 45(2):355–362, 2011), not much has been accomplished regarding the selection and incorporation of grammatical structures in ESP/EAP materials (Kennedy G, An introduction to corpus linguistics. Longman, London/New York, 1998). One reason might have been, in addition to the complexity of analyzing a corpus for grammatical structures, the common belief that different disciplines in ESP/EAP utilize different and diverse grammatical structures (Hyland K, Engl Specif Purp 4:149–161, 2002). Therefore, this study was designed to shed some light on the issue and to identify the most significantly frequent grammatical structures in ESP/EAP disciplines. To this end, first, a taxonomy of ESP/EAP disciplines was prepared using information from the literature on the history of classifications of science branches and existing ESP/EAP taxonomies. Cross checking the taxonomy with the university majors, a list of 6 macro disciplines with 29 micro disciplines and 399 university majors was prepared. Second, using a few software, a 150-million-word corpus that was collected from authentic ESP/EAP materials on these disciplines was analyzed for grammatical structures. Third, common grammatical structures with significant frequencies in each field were identified using Chi-square statistics. The findings revealed that contrary to the common expansionist view that ESP/EAP fields use diverse grammatical structures, many disciplines use a set of limited number of grammatical structures. The findings are promising for developing instructional materials and designing teaching strategies.