Resumen de Teaching and learning stance in specialized English for computing. A corpus linguistics approach

Francisco Alonso Almeida, Belén López Brito , Elena Quintana Toledo

• The use of large corpora in the study of languages is a well estab- lished tradition. In the same vein, scholarship is also well represented in the case of the study of corpora for making grammars of languages. This is the case of the COBUILD grammar and dictionary and the case of the Longman Gram- mar of Spoken and Written English. This means that corpora have been ana- lyzed in order to identify patterns in languages that can be later practised by learners following those patterns described and exemplified with real instances. The way in which we approach the use of corpus linguistics and teaching is ra- ther different but it is by no means new. We want to address the way in which large corpora of specialized languages can be used in the classroom to develop language skills, namely writing, speaking, listening, reading and interacting with a focus on the use of stance language, i.e. the expression of point of view. Interaction stands as the most problematic of the five language skills because, while the rest show a long tradition in second language acquisition studies, in- teraction has been only recently under focus. This said, our objective is to offer directions of use of Corpus Linguistics (CL) in second language acquisition, especially in the teaching of ICT English. We hypothesize that CL may provide learners with a better framework for the study of specific varieties through in- terrogation and analysis of those corpora. In this paper, we argue that CL helps to learn the phraseology concerning stance.