ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on do-it-yourself (DIY) corpus-building by presenting data from surveys of three teachers and over 300 students who have used the approach. It describes a DIY corpus course and examines the advantages and disadvantages of DIY corpus work. The chapter discusses the circumstances under which a DIY corpus-building approach that is likely to be appropriate. Given the diversity in students' requirements, the ability to tailor course material individually to students' disciplines is a key factor motivating the course. Work is based on investigating a set of widely used academic discourse functions, which are likely to throw up interesting aspects of disciplinary variation. The views of students and teachers clearly suggest that the DIY corpus approach provides a valuable tool for specialized English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students as they write themselves into their disciplinary fields. It is also worth stressing a further benefit of the DIY corpus approach that distinguishes it from consulting a ready-made corpus.
