Concordancing and ESP: Scientific English

In this paper I suggest that analysis of specialised corpora of texts from particular scientific areas using concordancing tools may provide useful information for the ESP teacher, principally when selecting and grading items to be included in the syllabus or when desigining materials for an ESP course. The scientific area I consider here is medicine and, to exemplify possible uses of corpus concordancing, I consider a corpus of medical research papers about hepatitis of about 30,000 words. The methodology used can equally be applied to any othe similar corpus of "special language" texts. In these pages I first explain whct concordancing tools are; i then focus on the type of information they provide and, finally, on how this information can be exploited in both syllabus and materials design. Some examples of concordance based activities are provided.