Motivating College Students’ Learning English for Specific Purposes Courses through Corpus Building

Lin-Fang Wu

doi:10.5539/elt.v7n6p120

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine how to motivate technical college students to learn English for specific purposes (ESP) courses through corpus building and enhance their language proficiency during the coursework for their majors. This study explores corpus building skills, how to simplify ESP courses by corpus building for English as second language learners, and ESP course evaluations. Although ESP programs have been implemented in technical colleges in Taiwan for several years, many students and educational practitioners feel frustrated regarding the academic achievement of learners’ ESP courses. Corpus building is crucial for implementing an ESP program and its subsequent success. Designing appropriate teaching materials enables learners to overcome their fears when taking ESP courses. Numerous linguistic professionals have mentioned that ESP courses are aimed at advanced learners. However, the vocabulary size of most technical college students is below 2000 words in Taiwan. Teaching an ESP course at a technical university is challenging work for ESP teachers. Constructing an ESP corpus and selecting appropriate ESP vocabulary to meet learner needs is essential. Building a localized corpus and designing appropriate ESP materials based on student language proficiency is the future trend for ESP courses. In this study, we discuss basic rules for developing linguistics corpora, how to build localized corpora, and the most commonly used tutorials for corpus building.

Highlights

Globalization has caused English for specific purposes (ESP) courses to grow more rapidly in the past few decades
This study explores corpus building skills, how to simplify ESP courses by corpus building for English as second language learners, and ESP course evaluations
Building a localized corpus and designing appropriate ESP materials based on student language proficiency is the future trend for ESP courses

Summary

Introduction

Globalization has caused ESP courses to grow more rapidly in the past few decades. ESP courses gradually become the mainstream for second language learning worldwide. Second language learners at technical colleges in Taiwan often feel frustrated about taking ESP courses because of limited vocabulary size. Motivating college students to learn ESP courses through corpus building can bridge the gap between ESP and English as a second language. The researcher introduces the skills related to designing ESP courses that involve corpus building. These skills comprise both simplifying and evaluating the courses, and teaching strategies. Designing a corpus-based ESP course enables technical college students to have an effective learning. Developing ESP course materials, selecting course content, and networking with other community colleges are essential elements for the academic English as a second language (Perkins, 1993)

Principles for Corpus Building

Corpus Builders

Criteria

Corpus Composition

Corpus Size

Data Collection Staff and Document Format

Representatives of Corpora Data

Corpus Building Software

Corpora Examples

Basic 2000-Word Vocabulary before Commencing ESP Courses

Applying Textbook-Based and Localized Corpus to ESP Teaching

Selecting Appropriate ESP Vocabulary for Technical College Students