Lexical Acquisition in ESP via Corpus Tools: Two Case Studies

Abstract

This paper aims to illustrate the application of a corpus-based approach in teaching ESP (English for Specific Purposes) by means of two case studies: Group 1 in 2004/2005 and Group 2 the following year. The first group of university students approached lexical material by exploiting micro-skills such as identifying key repetitions, formulating semantic prosody, finding best equivalents in Spanish, etc. The second group used the same academic corpus via electronic resources. According to the overall results, the second group of students outperformed the first one in their use of lexical input and the main findings point to the observation of their improved answers regarding the production of lexis. The tests and questionnaires served as chief control instruments at the end of the courses.