Developing and Exploiting an ESAP Corpus: Design, Compilation, Exploration and the Creation of an Online Lexical Tool

专门学术目的英语（ESAP）语料库通过承认“课程的读写能力要求涉及各种交际实践，包括体裁、领域和学科”（莱亚和斯特里特，1998：159），与当前的学术读写能力概念相结合。然而，由于它们通常是由个人出于研究目的汇编的（Krishnamurthy和Kosem，2007：35; Alsop和Nesi，2009：72），它们基本上仍然是私人文本收藏，即它们不属于公共领域。本项目的目的是开发和利用一个大型的ESAP艺术和人文文本语料库，并通过一个专门的网站将语料库和研究结果免费提供给EAP教学和研究使用。本项目的第一阶段将是设计和编译语料库。它将基于经验语言学证据（例如Durrant，2009）进行结构化，使用博士论文作为源文本，因为它们代表了最高学术素养水平的学生写作（Thompson，2005），并受到学科特定惯例的严重影响（Swales，2004：103）。语料库将需要很大，以便“分析更罕见的项目，并检测语言使用的更精细的细节”（Krishnamurthy，2000：175），例如学术词汇，捆绑和搭配。最终的AH语料库将免费提供给EAP学生，教师和研究人员。在此之后，研究者将使用语料库来探索AH文本的重要语言和语篇特征，特别是在专业词汇方面。这一点很重要，因为大多数现有的学术词汇表都是通用的，因此为理解学科惯例提供了不充分的基础（参见Hyland and Tse，2007; Hyland，2008; Durrant，2009）。本文采用混合法语料探索，采用定量数据（语料库调查结果）和定性数据（由EAP实践者进行的专家判断），将解决书面学术语篇中发现的学科差异，获得真正的新发现，这将对EAP研究者和教师具有理论和实践意义。最后，因为有证据表明语料库的实际课堂使用并不普遍（见Jarvis，2004;吉尔伯特，2013; Timmis，2015），重要的是，语料库创建和探索的结果被反馈到ESAP教学中使用的免费和用户友好的在线词汇工具的开发中。这一工具将在ESAP实验课程中试用，以衡量其在教学方面的功效。与现有的在线词汇工具（如Compleat Lexical Tutor）不同，这一针对特定学科的在线词汇工具将与当前的学术素养概念相结合，代表了这一领域的首创，并对英国及其他地区的ESAP教学具有实际意义。汇编将在网上提供的大型人类健康语料库的问题和过程是什么？2. AH话语词汇中最重要、最常见和最显著的特征是什么？它们与一般学术话语的相似/不同之处是什么？3. AH在线词汇工具能帮助学生以用户友好的方式提高词汇知识吗？

English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) corpora engage with current conceptions of academic literacies by acknowledging 'the literacy demands of the curriculum as involving a variety of communicative practices, including genres, fields and disciplines' (Lea and Street, 1998: 159). However, because they are typically compiled by individuals for research purposes (Krishnamurthy and Kosem, 2007: 35; Alsop and Nesi, 2009: 72), they remain largely private collections of texts, i.e. they are not in the public domain. The aim of this project is to develop and exploit a large ESAP corpus of Arts and Humanities texts, and make the corpus and findings freely available online through a dedicated website for use in EAP pedagogy and research.The first stage of this project will be to design and compile the corpus. It will be structured based on empirical linguistic evidence (e.g. Durrant, 2009), using PhD theses as the source texts because they represent assessed student writing at the highest level of academic literacy (Thompson, 2005) and are heavily impacted by discipline specific conventions (Swales, 2004: 103). The corpus will need to be large in order 'to analyse rarer items, and to detect the finer details of language use' (Krishnamurthy, 2000: 175), e.g. academic words, bundles and collocations. The final AH corpus will be made freely available online to EAP students, teachers and researchers. Following this, the researcher will use the corpus to explore important linguistic and discoursal features of AH texts, particularly in terms of specialised vocabulary. This is important because the majority of existing listings of academic vocabulary are generic and therefore provide an inadequate foundation for understanding disciplinary conventions (see Hyland and Tse, 2007; Hyland, 2008; Durrant, 2009). This mixed-method corpus exploration, using quantitative data (corpus findings) and qualitative data (expert-judgement by EAP practitioners), will address the disciplinary variation found in written academic discourse, achieving genuinely new findings that will have theoretical and practical significance for EAP researchers and teachers.Finally, because there is evidence to suggest that actual classroom use of corpora is not widespread (see Jarvis, 2004; Gilbert, 2013; Timmis, 2015), it is important that findings from the corpus creation and exploration are fed into the development of a free and user-friendly online lexical tool for use in ESAP teaching-learning. This tool will be piloted in an experimental ESAP course in order to gauge its efficacy for teaching-learning purposes. Unlike existing online lexical tools (e.g. Compleat Lexical Tutor), this discipline-specific online lexical tool will engage with current conceptions of academic literacies, representing the first of its kind and having practical implications for ESAP teaching-learning in the UK and beyond.The project will address the following research questions:1. What are the issues and processes of compiling a large AH corpus that will be made available online?2. What are some of the most important, frequent and significant features of the vocabulary of AH discourse, and how are they similar/ different to comparable features of general academic discourse?3. Can an AH online lexical tool help students improve their vocabulary knowledge in a user-friendly manner?