Corpus-based Case Study Research Articles

Lexicogrammar in the international construction industry: A corpus-based case study of Japanese–Hong-Kongese on-site interactions in English

The purpose of this research is to identify and interpret statistically significant lexicogrammatical items that are used in on-site spoken communication in the international construction industry, initially through comparisons with reference corpora of everyday spoken and business language. Several data sources, including audio and video recordings, interviews, expert informant insights and observation notes are operationalised to understand the context that the lexicogrammatical items reflexively constitute, for instance the discursive practices the engineers invoke in their working day. As in other workplaces, several types of interpersonal items are statistically significant when compared to everyday talk, such as deontic modality, hedges and fillers, certain back channels and the pronoun we. Also, place deixis is statistically significant in this specific context, and is often accompanied by non-verbal communication and visual images. These findings shed light on the way power and solidarity are negotiated in this context, and on the importance of face. In conclusion, the authors recommend training for inexperienced engineers and engineering students that develops their problem-solving, relationship-building and communication skills.

Towards Text-Based Second Language Teaching

This article surveys corpus research into what might generally be referred to as conventionalism in language use, and discusses its implications for second language teaching methodology. After an introductory section with traditional and more recent views on the idiomatic and formulaic nature of language use, Section 2 presents a survey of corpus-based case studies into preselected types of lexical patterning like idioms and collocations. Section 3 presents the cruder statistical approach of automatically assessing the frequency of recurrent combinations in texts. The results suggest that conventionalism extends far beyond the traditionally recognised patterns, and might be the basic combinatory principle underlying the composition of written and oral texts. After a short section with some evidence that conventional sequencing is also a feature in learner output, the concluding section (5) argues that to do justice to the phenomenon of conventionalism in language use, teaching methodology should be essentially text-based.

How Useful Is Eap Vocabulary for Esp? a Corpus Based Case Study

This study compares the vocabulary of a single Economics text of almost 300,000 running words with the vocabulary of a corpus of similar length made up of a variety of academic texts. It was found that the general academic corpus used a very much larger vocabulary than the more focused Economics text. A small number of words that were closely related to the topic of the text occurred with very high frequency in the Economics text. The general academic corpus had a very large number of low frequency words. Beyond the words in West's General Service List and the University Word List, there was little overlap between the vocabulary of the two corpora. This indicates that as far as vocabulary is concerned, EAP courses that go beyond the high frequency academic vocabulary are of little value for learners with specific purposes.