Corpus Analysis of Disciplinary Variation and the Teaching of Esp/Eap

The teaching of EAP/ESP has always been informed by rigorous investigation and description of the language that learners will need in their intended future activities’ and, with increased access to corpus resources and tools, both researchers and practitioners are increasingly influenced by corpus approaches. This chapter will provide an overview of corpus studies of disciplinary variation in academic contexts, outlining first the types of corpora that have been created and then the type software analyses that have been conducted, under the general headings of quantitative and qualitative studies. This will be followed by a review of the major studies of disciplinary variation, looking at studies of rhetorical organisation, metadiscourse, citation practices, stance, grammatical and lexical complexity, and, finally, vocabulary. The review concludes with a discussion of discipline-specific academic wordlists. The second section of the chapter will survey published corpus-informed EAP/ESP teaching materials that address discipline-specific discourses, and the third section will review published accounts of how practitioners have introduced corpus approaches into their teaching, either through corpus-informed materials or through asking learners to engage directly with corpus data online (weak and strong forms of data-driven learning).