小型语料库在专门用途英语教学中的应用——以航空英语教学为例

Application of Small Corpora in ESP Teaching:A Case Study of Aeronautical English Teaching

目前中国开展的专门用途英语(ESP)教学很容易陷入"以知识为导向"和"经验主义"的误区。ESP教师若能基于对学生的需求分析,选择真实语料,自建ESP语料库,则能很好地解决这两个问题。以航空英语为切入点,建立小型语料库,探讨其在ESP教学中的应用。基于该语料库对fail类和failure类词的使用进行定量分析,证实了航空英语比通用英语更倾向使用动词名词化结构。这一案例分析表明,语料库确实能够帮助学生认识航空英语的特点,提高其对语言现象的敏感性。

ESP teaching in China is misled by “knowledge-orientation” and classes are normally delivered based on teachers＇personal experience .If ESP teachers can make a need analysis for the students and choose authentic materi -als to establish an ESP corpus , the problems can be solved .By establishing an aeronautical English corpus , the paper explores the application of corpora in ESP teaching .Based on this corpus , a quantitative analysis of the frequency of“fail” and “failure” is made to prove the hypothesis that aeronautical English tends to use more verb nominalization structures.The case study indicates that small corpus is effective in helping students acquire the characteristics of aeronautical English and make them sensitive to language phenomenon .