Abstrakt
This paper demonstrates a usage-based approach, drawing on language corpora, to creating teaching materials. The need for such materials stems from the growing demand for courses of English for specific purposes on one hand, and the surprising lack or inadequacy of available materials for these courses on the other hand.
We propose a usage-based approach to creating teaching materials for specialised courses. Language corpora are used for developing authentic teaching materials, tailored to the needs of students of the given specialisation.
Our approach makes use of language corpora as the primary source and shows how information from them can be used in courses of specialised English. On the example of English for mathematicians, we present different types of exercises.
These can be divided into three broad groups. First, inductive exercises, aimed at familiarising the students with the structures specific of the texts from their discipline.
Second, exercises for practising an already familiar rule. Third, exercises raising awareness of certain phenomena which the students are familiar with from general English but whose usage differs slightly in specialised English for mathematicians.