Speaker
KEYWORDS
specialised corpus, ESP, academic writing
ABSTRACT
This presentation reports on the development of a specialised corpus, the Corpus of Academic Writing for Engineering Studies (CAWES), to address the need for relevant and up-to-date resources in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses. CAWES consists of peer-reviewed research articles published across various engineering sub-disciplines and allows teachers to generate pedagogical word and collocation lists that enhance language instruction. An online concordancer for CAWES has been developed to support self-access learning and materials development. A case study was conducted to explore engineering students’ experience of using the concordancer and relevant resources such as word lists. The study showed that access to these resources enabled students to develop an awareness of discipline-specific textual features, although additional guidance was generally needed. These findings suggest that corpus-based tools can better prepare students for academic and professional communication in engineering contexts and beyond. The presentation will also discuss suggestions for developing and incorporating corpus-based resources.
| TITLE | The development of the Corpus of Academic Writing for Engineering Studies |
|---|---|
| RELEVANT SIG | Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) |
| FORMAT | Practice-oriented Oral Face-to-face presentation (25 minutes, including Q&A) |
