Calibrating digital method integration into ESP courses according to disciplinary settings

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the effects of a digitally enhanced teaching strategy in an ESP course. The intervention method consists of guided corpus linguistics exercises which are progressively introduced to improve the students’ academic writing. We collected data from various task-based corpus processing, consultation and analysis stages, each one having a different complexity level: compilation of a discipline-specific expert corpus, consultation of a native speaker English corpus and analyses of both types. The pre- and post-intervention results are quantitatively and qualitatively assessed, controlling for discipline specificity. The results of a corpus consultation satisfaction survey are also included in the analysis. We conclude that corpus consultations not only lead to the improvement of ESP students’ writing but also increasing student motivation. The recommendation is to first test the digital methods in ESP courses and calibrate them according to disciplinary settings.