Open AccessCalibrating digital method integration into ESP courses according to disciplinary settings
Author(s) -
Mădălina Chitez,
Loredana Bercuci
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
new trends and issues proceedings on humanities and social sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2547-8818
DOI - 10.18844/prosoc.v7i1.4862
Subject(s) - corpus linguistics , discipline , task (project management) , computer science , intervention (counseling) , test (biology) , english for specific purposes , natural language processing , psychology , mathematics education , engineering , sociology , paleontology , social science , systems engineering , psychiatry , biology
This study aims to analyse the effects of a digitally enhanced teaching strategy in an ESP course. The intervention method consists of guided corpus linguistics exercises which are progressively introduced to improve the students’ academic writing. We collected data from various task-based corpus processing, consultation and analysis stages, each one having a different complexity level: compilation of a discipline-specific expert corpus, consultation of a native speaker English corpus and analyses of both types. The pre- and post-intervention results are quantitatively and qualitatively assessed, controlling for discipline specificity. The results of a corpus consultation satisfaction survey are also included in the analysis. We conclude that corpus consultations not only lead to the improvement of ESP students’ writing but also increasing student motivation. The recommendation is to first test the digital methods in ESP courses and calibrate them according to disciplinary settings.