A corpus-based study on the English used in automotive engineering: Implications for teaching English for specific purposes

The trend of incorporating corpus data with classroom applications in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) settings has accelerated in recent years since its contribution into genre-based instruction was widely recognized at tertiary education. Until then, as Flowerdew (2015) points out, "as far as pedagogy is concerned, corpora have had far more impact on indirect applications, that is, on reference works such as dictionaries and grammars, than on direct ones" (p.100). In order to increase the potential benefits of corpus research into ESP instruction, thereby encouraging learners towards DDL (data-driven learning) through direct corpus applications rather than indirect ones, the present study mainly aims to improve the content of English for Automotive Engineering course and construct an applicable needs-driven and corpus-informed syllabus. As a secondary purpose, the study intends to familiarize AE students with technically relevant lexical items they are going to utilize in their future workplaces, which will ultimately heighten their occupational skills. Lastly, in addition to its benefits to ESP learners, it is anticipated that the study will provide assistance to ESP practitioners, material developers, and syllabus designers correspondingly. In accordance with these purposes, first and foremost, by taking Automotive Engineering department in a state university in Turkey as a case, the study explores language needs and expectations of 168 participants involved in the process; namely AE (Automotive Engineering) students, ESP practitioners in the setting, subject matter teachers and automotive engineers. This needs-analysis phase which aids to take a snapshot of the status quo of ESP instruction is extended by the creation of Automotive Engineering English Corpus. AEEC, which consists of 114 written automotive texts is a customized corpus with 2,160,512 running words. In order to represent this specialized register of English for pedagogical purposes, an Automotive Engineering Technical Word List (AETWL) and an Automotive Engineering Technical Collocation List (AETCL) were extracted by calculating the frequencies of lexical items in AEEC into account. Owing to both needs analysis and corpus analysis conducted in this study, it is explicitly revealed that there is an urgent need for a novel instructional approach to the ESP lesson based on productive skills and free from traditional classroom applications. Besides, corpus analysis results demonstrate that AEEC includes relatively more technical items when compared to its counterparts. The synthesis of both quantitative and qualitative findings from needs analysis and corpus analysis has enabled the preparation of a sample genre-based ESP syllabus and a tentative micro-teaching lesson plan accordingly. In conclusion, this case study promises highly significant and proactive measures in terms of the results it has provided in line with the philosopy of learner-centredness. Keywords: English for Specific Purposes, corpus, data-driven learning, data-driven teaching, genre-based instruction.