Abstract:

In recent years, a lot of debates have emerged around the pedagogical relevance of corpus findings in language teaching. The use of language corpora has shown considerable potential of data-driven learning for specialized vocabulary acquisition. However, in organizing English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching, vocabulary has to be selected carefully to ensure that key lexical concepts are covered, and provide varied opportunities for practice to develop students’ terminological competence.

The focus of this paper is to design a framework within a corpus-based approach to building cognitive models, conceptual knowledge structures, and to explore how they can be beneficial for effective ESP classroom applications. The ESP course involved 56 attending master’s students in the BMSTU (Bauman Moscow State Technical University) Engineering Business and Management Department. The study focused on the following aspects:
(1) uncovering the structure of the lexical concept (‘dismissal’) and its cognitive model profile,
(2) selecting corpus-based resources aimed at extending students’ specialized vocabulary by means of introducing it in terms of lexical concepts and their cognitive models,
(3) assessing the knowledge of lexical concepts.

The paper analyses the application of corpus techniques, including the creation of frequency lists, the use of concordances, thesauri, term extraction, and the generation of collocational statistics, in establishing and systemizing semantic relations within the conceptual structure.

Keywords:

English for specific purposes, cognitive models, corpus-based approach to teaching.