ESP teacher education at the interface of theory and practice: introducing a model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis

Huettner, Julia, Smit, Ute and Mehlmauer-Larcher, Barbara (2009) ESP teacher education at the interface of theory and practice: introducing a model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis. System, 37 (1), 99-109. (doi:10.1016/j.system.2008.06.003).

Abstract

One of the effects of the growing importance of global English in professional contexts has been the rise of ESP teaching at all levels. Despite the concurrently increasing demand for ESP teachers, pre-service teacher education programmes in Europe have so far largely neglected this important area.

In order to address the professional needs of future ESP teachers, a novel and coherent framework for mediating the findings of corpus linguistics and genre analysis has been developed. The advantages of such a model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis lie in its flexibility of application to diverse ESP settings and target groups, so empowering both student teachers and their future pupils to develop autonomous language capabilities.

Following this model, student teachers are familiarized with the potential of specialized corpora as a source of information regarding specific genres, such as contracts of sale, sustainability reports or company profiles, and as a tool in materials development.

This model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis, which will be presented and discussed in this paper, has been implemented in an innovative teacher education project at the English Department of the University of Vienna.

Feedback from both student teachers and future employers underlines the positive effects of such a linguistics-informed approach to teacher education.

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