Corpus-Informed Research and Learning in ESP

These specially-commissioned studies cover corpus-informed approaches to researching, teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The corpora used range from very large published corpora to small tailor-made collections of written and spoken text, as well as parallel and contrastive corpora, in both the hard and softer sciences. Designed to tackle the problems faced by a variety of first- and second-language ESP users (specialised translators, undergraduates, junior and experienced researchers, and language trainers), the breadth of approaches enables treatment of issues central to ESP and corpus research, from corpus compilation and analysis to new applications and data-driven learning. The first full-length book on applied corpus use in France, Corpus-Informed Research and Learning in ESP will be of interest not only to those working in the French context, but to a wide variety of language professionals – teachers, researchers or course designers – in many countries looking at ESP from different linguistic, cultural and educational perspectives.

Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Universidad de Murcia, in Iberica 27: 221-224, 2014:
This volume is an excellent illustration of how the dichotomy between the register and the genre traditions outlined by Biber and Conrad (2009) can be resolved. While most of the papers in this collection present a combined research approach that takes into account qualitative as well as quantitative methods, there is a shared motivation to include corpus-driven, attested uses of language and innovative tools that, combined with quantitative methods such as keyword analysis or applications of standard deviation, can be instrumental in the description of specialized languages and their applications in language teaching. Thus, in this volume the reader will find references to both well-established software (Antconc) or cutting-edge applications such as the suite described by POUDAT and FOLLETE, and to corpora that can shed further light into some of the domains represented in the volume, in particular Economics, Medicine, Biology and Geology. The volume is prefaced by JOHN SWALES and the tables, figures and appendixes are extremely useful and easy to use.