Business English, Professional English, Legal English, Medical English,
Academic English etc.
Online Journal for Teachers

ESP World

ISSN 1682-3257

http://esp-world.info

 

A case study demonstrating the development of a short workplace English course in Hong Kong

M. Brooke

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how a lexical approach can be combined with a corpus-based approach to develop a short course for English for Specific purposes (ESP). Applying a life story model, it recounts how an English language curriculum for a specific target language community was developed. Language research through concordancing was conducted to deconstruct a small 2000 word text to find the most common language patterns and collocations specific to the lexical field in question and to draw up the language syllabus. In addition, through an initial needs analysis with participants, a list of communicative functions was drawn up and situational dialogues created to facilitate these functions. Although the course itself was not taught, a final post-course design reflection is offered to complete the research cycle.

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