ABSTRACT
In the field of English for Specific Purposes, corpora have been widely employed to deepen our understanding of the nature of vocabulary in spoken and written texts for specific purposes, particularly recently as access to corpora and corpus-based tools for analysis are more readily available than before. Core issues and research approaches that will be discussed in this chapter include identifying lexical items (single and multiword unit) that are worth learning because of their frequency and/or their importance in relation to a specific topic and finding out more about how large a vocabulary might be in various areas of ESP. This research helps us understand more about issues facing second and foreign language ESP students in their quest to learn and learn to use specialized vocabulary appropriately and in the right context. Corpora have also been used both directly and indirectly to support the learning and teaching of vocabulary, sometimes to quite good effect, but often not so much. This chapter attempts to draw together key issues on corpora in teaching and learning vocabulary in ESP, illustrate current research through several case studies of innovative uses of corpora in ESP, and finally discuss several directions for future research.
