The design of pedagogical tasks for teaching English for Academic Purposes

achievements and challenges of Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

In the last decades, a large number of higher education institutions (HEIs) sought to internationalize their activities. Since English is the lingua franca of the academy (AMMON, 2011; JENKINS, 2009; TARDY, 2004), publishing in that language facilitates the dissemination of scientific knowledge produced in the country and increases the chances of citation and collaboration (BOCORNY et al., in press; MENEGHINI; PACKER, 2007 apud BAUMVOL, 2018). In view of the described context, this study aims to propose principles for the elaboration of pedagogical tasks (PTs) with the use of linguistic data extracted from a specialized corpus related to the language conventionally used in research articles. From this general objective, two specific objectives are derived. The first, of an analytical nature, seeks to extract, categorize and classify multi-word expressions from a specialized corpus of texts in the introduction section of recent research articles (2003-2019) published in English in international physics journals. The second, of a pedagogical nature, aims to use the collected linguistic data to inform the construction of PTs for teaching and learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The PTs resulting from this study are available online and free of charge in the Virtual Learning Environment LÚMINA Idiomas (BOCORNY, 2017).