A Corpus-Based Study for the Identification of ESP Learning Needs of Business Students in Pakistan

Abstract

General English language learners can generally communicate well, but their vocabulary in specific fields is normally limited. This study aims to demonstrate the use of a specific language corpus for identifying the learning needs of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students in Pakistan. For this purpose, two hundred fundamental textbooks from the field of business studies are selected and processed by using appropriate software, and a list of technical words is generated. The data extracted from the corpus helps to identify the learning needs of business students in terms of technical vocabulary. The study shows that the corpus is an effective tool to identify the ESP needs of learners. The study suggests the dire need to adopt corpus-based teaching and learning methodologies to cater to the ESP learning needs of the learners. Moreover, this corpus can serve as a basis for designing a lexical syllabus for ESP learners in Pakistan.

Keywords

• corpus analysis
• english for specific purposes
• technical terms of business
• learning needs
• corpus as a tool