Content Language Acquisition: A Corpus Informed Approach to Materials Design

Abstract

The use of corpora (collections of text) within English for Academic Purposes (EAP) continues to grow (Hyland 2000, 2002; McEnery & Xiao 2010) and has been used to provide insights into written and spoken academic English. Much of the work conducted in corpora-informed materials design has tended to be of a general nature (e.g., JDEST, Yang 1986); or of a specific nature that does not address the content language needs of Art & Design students and teachers (e.g., Medical Science, Marco 1999; Pharmaceutical Science, Gledhill 2000). The nature of English language provision at UAL, which endeavours to provide English language development that is as discipline-specific as possible, has further highlighted the need for specialist corpora to inform teaching materials and thus aid the acquisition of content language.

We are creating corpora that attempt to bridge the gap between a general English language approach to EAP materials and a more content specific approach. A corpus comprised of written Graphic Design texts drawn from Course Leader recommendations was compiled. This corpus provided the basis for the creation of 16 hours of stand-alone teaching materials designed for Language Development courses. The presentation discusses the context and the creation of the teaching materials, how the materials address content language and the outcomes from trialling the materials. We believe the project, whilst using Graphic Design as its example, confirms the need for and usefulness of specialist corpora within EAP material design to facilitate the acquisition of content language for other fields of Art and Design.