Pedagogical Application of Specialized Corpora in ESP Teaching: the case of the UVaSTECorpus

Abstract

This article contributes to defining the concept of specialized corpora, reviews the rationale for using them instead of general corpora in teaching activities, and offers the state of art in both corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to ESP teaching. It also explains some decisions taken regarding the compilation of the University of Valladolid Corpus of Written Scientific and Technical English and illustrates some uses of the corpus. In particular, it presents some tasks with concordances and defends that ESP students should be taught the niceties of lexical gender as it is a grammatical category with social and/or ideological implications.