ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what corpora are and their role in English for specific purposes (ESP) course design. Corpora can be general or specific. For example, the British National Corpus is a general purpose, 100-million-word corpus drawn from spoken and written texts from a range of sources. Corpus data is analysed using corpus software tools. These tools can generate word-frequency lists, collocations and keywords. These tools are referred to as concordancers. Software is available for online analysis. Developing a corpus of written texts is relatively easy if the discipline is open to sharing texts – for example, an academic department could make a reading list available to the ESP practitioner. Corpora can be made up of published and unpublished professional texts or of learners' texts.
