Ensino e produção de material de inglês instrumental para a área de tecnologia ambiental com base na linguística de corpus : uma interface com a linguística cognitiva.

Abstract

The present work was aimed at producing teaching material for an ESP (English for specific purposes) course which targeted Environmental Technology academic students. This course purpose is very focused on preparing students to read academic papers in this area. To this end, the investigative path was suported by the methodological and theoretical framework from Corpus Linguistics, which interfaced with some principles from Cognitive Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics is a study area that takes an empirical approach to language and sees it as a probabilistic system. It is based on the collection and analysis of corpus data criteriously selected from real language use, which could be read by computers with the aim of linguistic research. Its methodology also involves the analysis, recognition and extraction of language patterns from a corpus, such as the lexical bundles and the formulaic sequences. Besides the study of the corpus itself, Corpus Linguistics also offers ways of using its methodology and tools towards language teaching. Therefore, this study describes the process of elaboration and analysis of a corpus of academic papers in the area of environmental technology and subsequent use of such data in developing teaching activities.