Using specialised discourse in the ESP classroom

The use of corpus-driven materials in the LSP classroom can be a useful way to introduce students to genres related to their academic and/or professional contexts. In particular, this paper illustrates the didactic activities carried out by Business and Tourism graduate students (with a proficiency level ranging from B1 to C1) who used corpus tools in the ESP classroom for the first time. The aim of the activities was to raise students’ awareness of how language actually works as well as help them become more autonomous language learners by providing them with a critical approach to reading texts. Specifically, the students used corpus tools to analyse the discourse adopted by hotels when communicating their green practices. Through the use of a concordancing program, the students analysed a corpus of webpages from hotels which have received awards for their sustainable practices in order to investigate the promotion of sustainability and decide whether potential tourists might consider the message conveyed reliable. Moreover, by involving two different groups of students, insights are provided into how the intended message is perceived by readers with different academic backgrounds and/or different interests in order to pinpoint discrepancies between the underlying message and its linguistic representation. Finally, the findings suggest that even learners with relatively low levels of proficiency can benefit from the use of corpus tools in LSP contexts.