How to Cite

Conrad, Susan: Beyond Grammar Description: Applying Corpus Analysis to Disciplinary Education, in Fuß, Eric et al. (Eds.): Grammar and Corpora 2016, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018, p. 389–412. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.361.c4713

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-946054-84-9 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-946054-82-5 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-3-946054-83-2 (Hardcover)

Published

05/16/2018

Authors

Susan Conrad

Beyond Grammar Description: Applying Corpus Analysis to Disciplinary Education

Abstract Corpus-based studies of grammar have greatly increased our under­standing of language use. As a field, however, corpus linguistics has been less successful in moving beyond description to substantive impacts. Many corpus studies claim important implications for education, but outside of second lan­guage teaching and translation, the results are rarely applied. In contrast, this paper describes a project designed to advance engineering education in the United States. The project has conducted several kinds of corpus-based gram­mar analyses of student and practitioner writing, and then applied the findings to materials that improve the preparation of students to write as professional engineers. Additional corpus analyses are used to analyze the impact of the materials on student writing. This paper traces the process used in the project and discusses its successes and challenges, encouraging other corpus linguists to apply their skills to diverse disciplines.

Keywords Corpus-based research applications, English corpus linguistics, engineering writing, corpus-based grammar teaching