Linguistica dei corpora e EAP: Lingua, pratiche comunicative e contesto d’uso

Research on EAP has shown an increasing interest in the developments in corpus linguistics over the last two decades. The major contribution of corpus linguistics to EAP has come in the description of the specific features of academic discourse. This chapter reviews the main directions of recent literature in this area, showing how the analysis of large quantities of data has made it possible to study the particular characteristics of different discourse domains and to investigate phenomena of variation. In terms of pedagogy, the chapter considers how the use of corpora has had a considerable impact on EAP teaching and learning. The increased familiarity of students with electronic tools for analysis can contribute to the development of their language awareness and can favour learner autonomy.