Reading skills in ESP contexts and corpus linguistics

Abstract EN

In an English for Specific Purposes (ESP, henceforth) context, reading remains one of the most crucial skills.

Most learning activities take place through reading.

Students are presented with authentic texts excerpted from the texts of the target discourse community (TDC, henceforth).

Students are required to read for comprehension, locate information, identify the salient textual features, manipulate the discursive lexicon-grammatical patterns, acquire a substantial stock of the target specialized vocabulary.

While grammatical patterns are still present in ESP reading texts, ESP vocabulary is by far the most daunting challenge to face by students.

However, this research aims at investigating reading in ESP contexts with reference to the use of corpus linguistics in generating specialized wordlists in several genres and registers.

To narrow down the focus, this research sheds light on English for medical purposes as it is by far the most difficult genre in ESP.

The remaining of this research is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces reading and its types, provides a brief account of reading strategies and skills, the next section introduces corpus linguistics and corpus analysis then there is a review some of the recent corpus-based studies which utilized corpus linguistics in investigating vocabulary analysis and development.

The last section is about conclusions.