ABSTRACT
Language teachers have long used lists of important vocabulary as a guide to course design and materials preparation, and corpus data have always played a major part in developing these lists. In this chapter, the authors describe the compilation of a corpus of science and engineering research articles, discuss issues related to approaches used for designing vocabulary teaching materials, and provide samples of teaching materials based on this corpus. A corpus aimed at first-year PhD science and engineering students at the University of Nottingham was compiled with a view to creating word lists and concordances on which to base vocabulary teaching materials. More recent studies have described the use of concordances to develop EAP/ESP teaching materials. Cortes compared the use of lexical bundles in published and student disciplinary writing using a corpus of history and biology research articles and students’ papers in the undergraduate lower and upper divisions and graduate level at Northern Arizona University.
