Supervisors: Aquilino Sánchez Pérez Address: Área de Filología Inglesa Dpto. Métodos Cuantitativos, Ciencias Jurídicas y Lenguas Modernas Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena Facultad de Ciencias de la Empresa C/ Real nº 3 30201 Cartagena, Murcia Spain
The need for English for Specific Purposes (hence ESP), skills-based courses is felt everywhere. ... more The need for English for Specific Purposes (hence ESP), skills-based courses is felt everywhere. The European Union has recently established the bases for the teaching and learning of foreign languages through its communication for the promotion of foreign language learning, as an answer to the demands of nowadays’ society. Strong pressure from the industry, together with the insistence of employers and institutions on the importance of English and other foreign languages, resulted in the revision of the accreditation criteria for technical universities in the late 90s, making European universities introduce training in social and communicative skills in their curricula. As a consequence, the majority of science and technology programmes currently include some kind of language courses, namely technical writing and oral presentation. Teaching methodologies are also being revised and changed to meet the requirements established by the new Higher Education system within the framework of the Bologna Process. Multidisciplinary practice is strongly promoted and there is an increasing awareness of the need to integrate content and language in the domain-specific courses. In the realms of technology and telecommunication, the scarcity of ESP textbooks is singularly surprising, regarding the leading role that English performs today as a lingua franca, and the number of universities which offer a degree in telecommunication engineering. On the contrary, it may not seem so surprising, due to the accelerated development of the field, where there is a constant creation of new concepts and the subsequent coinage of new terms that might become obsolescent overnight. In addition, the domain might seem too specific to raise the interest of publishing companies. All in all, a representative common core vocabulary of the subdisciplinary fields in telecommunications, properly sequenced in a coursebook, is mostly appreciated and rewarding for teaching, learning and testing. Corpus Linguistics tools and analyses provide better quality information about how words are used in specific contexts on the basis of frequency data required for measures of vocabulary size. At the UPCT, one among so many universities which are still adapting to Bologna directives, some ESP teachers are actively involved in educational projects and workshops, with the aim to develop teaching materials in accordance with the renewed methodology. The first evident result is this textbook, designed to agree with the new demands and linguistic needs as defined both by the concrete teaching demands of our university and the European standards. With the help of such a valuable research tool as a computerized corpus on telecommunication language , the present text is designed for students of telecommunication and telematic engineering, with the general objective of favouring the transition from level B1 to B2 of the European Language Passport, always within the specific domain of the telecommunications. The variety of activities it proposes, both through its units and appendices, gives evidence, in its turn, of the ambitious teaching scope it aims to cover, where theoretical and practical lessons, cooperative learning activities, self- and coevaluation proposals and tasks involving different skills (reading, writing, listening and interaction) are included. With regard to the generic competences that the text deals with, those that fundamentally apply here are the following,
GENERIC COMPETENCES INTENSIFICATION LEVEL Instrumental: Oral and written comprehension of a foreign language 1 (Indispensable) Interpersonal: Groupwork / Interpersonal abilities 2 (Necessary) Systemic: Ability to learn / Ability to work autonomously 3 (Advisable)
being the specific competences not so relevant here, as we must not forget that, for telecommunication students, English is mainly a tool, although one of great importance. Finally, we would like to thank the university organism that has backed our work, the Vicerrectorado de Convergencia Europea, as well as its responsible at the time, Josefina García León, for her pertinent suggestions; and we would also like to thank our dear colleague Ruth Herrero, who has closely followed this project, for the support given and for her enthusiasm towards the teaching praxis; and finally, many thanks to Javier Toledo for his invaluable help in the editing process of this work.
El uso de palabras y clusters latinos en el ingles juridico es una de las caracteristicas que con... more El uso de palabras y clusters latinos en el ingles juridico es una de las caracteristicas que contribuyen a su alto nivel de complejidad. La mayoria de los libros de texto y academicos sobre esta variedad del ingles describen su uso desde un enfoque prescriptivo basado en un numero reducido de textos, sin embargo, no se han realizado estudios descriptivos sobre este tema hasta la fecha que se basen corpus de mayor tamano. Por este motivo, este articulo estudia el tema desde la perspectiva de la linguistica del corpus para establecer el grado de representatividad de las palabras latinas ademas de clasificarlas segun su nivel de especializacion. Asimismo, tambien explora los diferentes resultados obtenidos antes y despues de discriminar las unidades de un solo elemento de las de dos o tres. Para llevar a cabo tales tareas, se ha compilado un corpus ad hoc de 2.5 millones de palabras con el fin de obtener los datos necesarios para este estudio. El corpus se ha denominado UKSCC.
corpus design. The available corpora existing do not satisfy our needs as we intend to establish ... more corpus design. The available corpora existing do not satisfy our needs as we intend to establish the core vocabulary of this ESP branch, so we have opted for creating our own, BLaRC: British Law Report Corpus. The selected genre are law reports (judicial decisions) as they stand at the very basis of common law The purpose of this paper is thus to show and justify the decisions we have made in its process of compilation and design.
This study aims at the analysis of the lexicon in English of the two professional areas, telecomm... more This study aims at the analysis of the lexicon in English of the two professional areas, telecommunications and finance, affected by the crises of the recent years: the 90s dot-com bubble and the present-day Credit Crunch. Both crises share a common context of wealth and cultural complexity, being the root for the coinage of innovative specialised terms and collocations. Our study is specifically aimed at unveiling the lexical coverage of both crises, in terms of technolects and their context, evolving in several phases. First, two corpora of specialised, semi-specialised and general texts from the domains’ digital periodicals will be characterized according to lexical relevance and terminological volume, to see the extent in which they are lexically connected or diverge when experiencing a critical situation like a crisis. Finally, clarifying how far these two disciplines have related during the last critical years will hopefully provide some clues for the lexical ethnography of tw...
The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a le... more The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a legal English corpus of judicial decisions. The authors, lecturers of this ESP variety, decided to engage into specific corpus design due to the small variety of teaching materials and corpora available. Judicial decisions are essential wheels in the legal machinery of common law systems and, precisely because of that fact, they are fundamental as a legal genre. This is why we intend to compile a 6m word legal corpus of UK judicial decisions in order to establish the core vocabulary of the genre and use it for further linguistic analysis and the elaboration of didactic materials.
Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the special... more Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the specialized character of a lexical unit. Wireless belongs to the repertoire of specialized vocabulary automatically extracted from a corpus of telecommunication engineering English (TEC). This paper describes the procedure followed in the analysis which is intended to fulfil a twofold purpose: first, to validate the automatic classification; and second, to gain a better insight on the lexical profile of telecommunication English. The statistical information provided by the variables of frequency, distribution and keyness, are combined with the data extracted from the exploration of the surrounding co-text, in order to describe the sintagmatic relations established.
... El repertorio léxico especializado del inglés de la ingeniería de telecomunicaciones: cómo y ... more ... El repertorio léxico especializado del inglés de la ingeniería de telecomunicaciones: cómo y por qué. Autores: Camino Rea Rizzo; Localización: Researching and teaching specialized languages: new contexts, new challenges / P. Sánchez Hernández ( ed. lit. ...
International journal of english studies, Vol, 2009
Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the special... more Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the specialized character of a lexical unit. Wireless belongs to the repertoire of specialized vocabulary automatically extracted from a corpus of telecommunication engineering English (TEC). This paper describes the procedure followed in the analysis which is intended to fulfil a twofold purpose: first, to validate the automatic classification; and second, to gain a better insight on the lexical profile of telecommunication English. The statistical information provided by the variables of frequency, distribution and keyness, are combined with the data extracted from the exploration of the surrounding co-text, in order to describe the sintagmatic relations established.
The use of linguistic corpora in language teaching has spread considerably in the last twenty-fiv... more The use of linguistic corpora in language teaching has spread considerably in the last twenty-five years thanks to the pioneer work by Johns [1], who coined the term data-driven learning (DDL, henceforth); Sinclair [2], who developed the concept further on; or Boulton [3], amongst others. DDL teaching methods promote language study based on the observation of concordances, that is, examples of the authentic use of keywords in context (KWC), which are retrieved from a linguistic corpus by running software programs specifically designed to that end, such as Wordsmith [4]. According to the literature on the subject, there exist arguments for and against the use of corpora in language teaching and there has been a fairly small number of pedagogical experiments in English for specific purposes (ESP) [3], particularly in the field of telecommunication English. This work suggests two activities for teaching terminology within this area applying DDL-based methodology, together with a pedago...
The need for English for Specific Purposes (hence ESP), skills-based courses is felt everywhere. ... more The need for English for Specific Purposes (hence ESP), skills-based courses is felt everywhere. The European Union has recently established the bases for the teaching and learning of foreign languages through its communication for the promotion of foreign language learning, as an answer to the demands of nowadays’ society. Strong pressure from the industry, together with the insistence of employers and institutions on the importance of English and other foreign languages, resulted in the revision of the accreditation criteria for technical universities in the late 90s, making European universities introduce training in social and communicative skills in their curricula. As a consequence, the majority of science and technology programmes currently include some kind of language courses, namely technical writing and oral presentation. Teaching methodologies are also being revised and changed to meet the requirements established by the new Higher Education system within the framework of the Bologna Process. Multidisciplinary practice is strongly promoted and there is an increasing awareness of the need to integrate content and language in the domain-specific courses. In the realms of technology and telecommunication, the scarcity of ESP textbooks is singularly surprising, regarding the leading role that English performs today as a lingua franca, and the number of universities which offer a degree in telecommunication engineering. On the contrary, it may not seem so surprising, due to the accelerated development of the field, where there is a constant creation of new concepts and the subsequent coinage of new terms that might become obsolescent overnight. In addition, the domain might seem too specific to raise the interest of publishing companies. All in all, a representative common core vocabulary of the subdisciplinary fields in telecommunications, properly sequenced in a coursebook, is mostly appreciated and rewarding for teaching, learning and testing. Corpus Linguistics tools and analyses provide better quality information about how words are used in specific contexts on the basis of frequency data required for measures of vocabulary size. At the UPCT, one among so many universities which are still adapting to Bologna directives, some ESP teachers are actively involved in educational projects and workshops, with the aim to develop teaching materials in accordance with the renewed methodology. The first evident result is this textbook, designed to agree with the new demands and linguistic needs as defined both by the concrete teaching demands of our university and the European standards. With the help of such a valuable research tool as a computerized corpus on telecommunication language , the present text is designed for students of telecommunication and telematic engineering, with the general objective of favouring the transition from level B1 to B2 of the European Language Passport, always within the specific domain of the telecommunications. The variety of activities it proposes, both through its units and appendices, gives evidence, in its turn, of the ambitious teaching scope it aims to cover, where theoretical and practical lessons, cooperative learning activities, self- and coevaluation proposals and tasks involving different skills (reading, writing, listening and interaction) are included. With regard to the generic competences that the text deals with, those that fundamentally apply here are the following,
GENERIC COMPETENCES INTENSIFICATION LEVEL Instrumental: Oral and written comprehension of a foreign language 1 (Indispensable) Interpersonal: Groupwork / Interpersonal abilities 2 (Necessary) Systemic: Ability to learn / Ability to work autonomously 3 (Advisable)
being the specific competences not so relevant here, as we must not forget that, for telecommunication students, English is mainly a tool, although one of great importance. Finally, we would like to thank the university organism that has backed our work, the Vicerrectorado de Convergencia Europea, as well as its responsible at the time, Josefina García León, for her pertinent suggestions; and we would also like to thank our dear colleague Ruth Herrero, who has closely followed this project, for the support given and for her enthusiasm towards the teaching praxis; and finally, many thanks to Javier Toledo for his invaluable help in the editing process of this work.
El uso de palabras y clusters latinos en el ingles juridico es una de las caracteristicas que con... more El uso de palabras y clusters latinos en el ingles juridico es una de las caracteristicas que contribuyen a su alto nivel de complejidad. La mayoria de los libros de texto y academicos sobre esta variedad del ingles describen su uso desde un enfoque prescriptivo basado en un numero reducido de textos, sin embargo, no se han realizado estudios descriptivos sobre este tema hasta la fecha que se basen corpus de mayor tamano. Por este motivo, este articulo estudia el tema desde la perspectiva de la linguistica del corpus para establecer el grado de representatividad de las palabras latinas ademas de clasificarlas segun su nivel de especializacion. Asimismo, tambien explora los diferentes resultados obtenidos antes y despues de discriminar las unidades de un solo elemento de las de dos o tres. Para llevar a cabo tales tareas, se ha compilado un corpus ad hoc de 2.5 millones de palabras con el fin de obtener los datos necesarios para este estudio. El corpus se ha denominado UKSCC.
corpus design. The available corpora existing do not satisfy our needs as we intend to establish ... more corpus design. The available corpora existing do not satisfy our needs as we intend to establish the core vocabulary of this ESP branch, so we have opted for creating our own, BLaRC: British Law Report Corpus. The selected genre are law reports (judicial decisions) as they stand at the very basis of common law The purpose of this paper is thus to show and justify the decisions we have made in its process of compilation and design.
This study aims at the analysis of the lexicon in English of the two professional areas, telecomm... more This study aims at the analysis of the lexicon in English of the two professional areas, telecommunications and finance, affected by the crises of the recent years: the 90s dot-com bubble and the present-day Credit Crunch. Both crises share a common context of wealth and cultural complexity, being the root for the coinage of innovative specialised terms and collocations. Our study is specifically aimed at unveiling the lexical coverage of both crises, in terms of technolects and their context, evolving in several phases. First, two corpora of specialised, semi-specialised and general texts from the domains’ digital periodicals will be characterized according to lexical relevance and terminological volume, to see the extent in which they are lexically connected or diverge when experiencing a critical situation like a crisis. Finally, clarifying how far these two disciplines have related during the last critical years will hopefully provide some clues for the lexical ethnography of tw...
The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a le... more The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a legal English corpus of judicial decisions. The authors, lecturers of this ESP variety, decided to engage into specific corpus design due to the small variety of teaching materials and corpora available. Judicial decisions are essential wheels in the legal machinery of common law systems and, precisely because of that fact, they are fundamental as a legal genre. This is why we intend to compile a 6m word legal corpus of UK judicial decisions in order to establish the core vocabulary of the genre and use it for further linguistic analysis and the elaboration of didactic materials.
Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the special... more Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the specialized character of a lexical unit. Wireless belongs to the repertoire of specialized vocabulary automatically extracted from a corpus of telecommunication engineering English (TEC). This paper describes the procedure followed in the analysis which is intended to fulfil a twofold purpose: first, to validate the automatic classification; and second, to gain a better insight on the lexical profile of telecommunication English. The statistical information provided by the variables of frequency, distribution and keyness, are combined with the data extracted from the exploration of the surrounding co-text, in order to describe the sintagmatic relations established.
... El repertorio léxico especializado del inglés de la ingeniería de telecomunicaciones: cómo y ... more ... El repertorio léxico especializado del inglés de la ingeniería de telecomunicaciones: cómo y por qué. Autores: Camino Rea Rizzo; Localización: Researching and teaching specialized languages: new contexts, new challenges / P. Sánchez Hernández ( ed. lit. ...
International journal of english studies, Vol, 2009
Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the special... more Wireless is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the specialized character of a lexical unit. Wireless belongs to the repertoire of specialized vocabulary automatically extracted from a corpus of telecommunication engineering English (TEC). This paper describes the procedure followed in the analysis which is intended to fulfil a twofold purpose: first, to validate the automatic classification; and second, to gain a better insight on the lexical profile of telecommunication English. The statistical information provided by the variables of frequency, distribution and keyness, are combined with the data extracted from the exploration of the surrounding co-text, in order to describe the sintagmatic relations established.
The use of linguistic corpora in language teaching has spread considerably in the last twenty-fiv... more The use of linguistic corpora in language teaching has spread considerably in the last twenty-five years thanks to the pioneer work by Johns [1], who coined the term data-driven learning (DDL, henceforth); Sinclair [2], who developed the concept further on; or Boulton [3], amongst others. DDL teaching methods promote language study based on the observation of concordances, that is, examples of the authentic use of keywords in context (KWC), which are retrieved from a linguistic corpus by running software programs specifically designed to that end, such as Wordsmith [4]. According to the literature on the subject, there exist arguments for and against the use of corpora in language teaching and there has been a fairly small number of pedagogical experiments in English for specific purposes (ESP) [3], particularly in the field of telecommunication English. This work suggests two activities for teaching terminology within this area applying DDL-based methodology, together with a pedago...
El uso de corpus especializados para la ensenanza del Ingles para Fines Especificos (IFE), su ana... more El uso de corpus especializados para la ensenanza del Ingles para Fines Especificos (IFE), su analisis linguistico o su traduccion esta muy extendido pues se trata de fuentes fiables de vocabulario que reflejan el uso real que de este hacen los miembros de la comunidad especializada proporcionando al analista, ensenante o traductor la posibilidad de estudiar la lengua desde una perspectiva descriptiva. Sin embargo, el numero de corpus especializados existente es muy reducido y su accesibilidad practicamente nula. Hoy en dia, la incorporacion de las TIC en el analisis del lenguaje ha facilitado enormemente el manejo de cantidades de datos imposibles de procesar de manera manual. El uso de metodos de extraccion automatica (ATR en ingles) para la identificacion de terminos especificos en los corpus especializados es una de las multiples aplicaciones de las TIC en el analisis del lenguaje. Este estudio presenta la aplicacion de uno de estos metodos para la identificacion de la terminolo...
The need to name and communicate to others new concepts in specific domains of human activity lea... more The need to name and communicate to others new concepts in specific domains of human activity leads to the formation of new terms. However, many of the technical words in English are not new from the point of view of form. They rather derive from the common stock of general language: new lexical units are built from already existing forms and/or meanings. The original form is used for naming a new concept by adding a distinctive specialized lexical feature while keeping some semantic features of the original concept. In this paper, we aim at explaining and visualizing the nature of some of the processes that allow for the construction of new senses in technical words through a branching and expanding process, as explained in the lexical constellation model. The analysis is performed on three words widely used in telecommunication English: "bus", "hub" and "chip". The understanding of the process may be of great help for learners of ESP in general and te...
AUTHOR ORDER
1st author Camino Rea Rizzo
2nd author María José Marín
Internationalization is on... more AUTHOR ORDER 1st author Camino Rea Rizzo 2nd author María José Marín
Internationalization is one of the main aims of today’s Spanish universities. According to the Strategy for the Internationalization of Spanish Universities 2015-2020 (MECD), internationalization is defined as the process to integrate an international, intercultural and global dimension into the aims, functions and development of Higher Education. University teaching offer is found on the bases for internationalization considered in three stages: i) development of mobility, ii) internationalization of degree programmes and iii) Institutional internationalization. In 2010 the Technical University of Cartagena (UPCT), through the International Excellence Campus Mare Nostrum 37/38, took on the challenge of promoting teaching in English and taking measures to provide teachers with the necessary resources to teach content subjects in English as part of the official offer in degree and master programmes. Since then, different lines of action have been developed for this purpose: certification of English proficiency, training and incentivization. Consistent with this policy, the UPCT’s internationalization plan (2017/2020) pursues to increase the number of bilingual programmes (English and Spanish) by promoting the offer of at least one bilingual itinerary, where a minimum of 50% credits are available in English, per University Centre. The groundwork for bilingual teaching or itineraries is incipiently found within the Campus Mare Nostrum subprogramme which defines the objective of planning subjects, designing teaching materials and performing the preparatory actions required to implement teaching in English in the following academic year. Precisely in this preparatory stage, an important lack was observed by the body of teachers involved in the project. They were missing a language tool to resort to when they needed to use the so-called classroom language and the vocabulary related to a university context like horas de tutoría, convocatoria de examen, aula virtual, etc. Hence, the language tool was envisioned in order to provide a work tool and a language resource for teaching in English which, in turn, facilitates communication and understanding between teachers and students. The tool covers three broad categories dealing with i) the classroom language, composed of four subcategories: informal talks among colleagues and students; conversations between teacher and student in the classroom; conversations during a personal tutorial; and conversations about administrative topics, ii) the basic mathematical language shared by technical subjects, divided into solving equations; notation and connectors; coordinate axes and graphical representation; and operations and functions, and iii) the specialized technical language of the contents subjects available in English (20 specializations). This work describes the development of the language tool from its beginning in 2015/16 as a compilation of language samples in a linguistic corpus, the parameters governing its systematization into a database, until its final outcome available on the webpage http://inglesuniversitario.upct.es
The features of specialised languages have been profusely described by scholars in the literature... more The features of specialised languages have been profusely described by scholars in the literature. Amongst them, Enrique Alcaraz’s work stands out as an exhaustive and comprehensive depiction of EPAP at all linguistic levels: lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. This research aims to provide a bottom-up assessment of his description of specialised discourse on a lexical level through the implementation of corpus-based techniques on two specialised corpora: UKSCC (a 2.6 million word legal English corpus) and TC (a 1.2 million-word telecommunications corpus). The results support Alcaraz’s portrayal of specialised lexicons as regards term usage, the relevance of sub-technical vocabulary in technical texts, the peculiarities of Latin single and multi-word terms in legal English and the significant presence and usage of abbreviations in telecommunications English.
The introduction of legal English as a compulsory subject in the curriculum of the Law Degrees ta... more The introduction of legal English as a compulsory subject in the curriculum of the Law Degrees taught at Spanish universities due to the implementation of the Bologna Reform has led to the design of syllabuses which are intended to enable students to become proficient users of this English variety with both academic and professional purposes. This paper presents a corpus-based proposal for the grading of materials for the teaching of legal vocabulary which can be extrapolated to other varieties of English for Specific and Academic Purposes (ESAP). In order to exemplify it, a sample list of 33 crime nouns (obtained from the legal English textbooks consulted) has been examined in terms of their frequency, keyness and text range values in an ad hoc legal corpus of 2.6 million words, UKSCC. After doing so, Chung’s automatic term recognition (ATR) method has been applied so as to establish their level of specialisation. Our proposal relies on the assumption that the information obtained after taking these different parameters into consideration might be helpful for the ESAP instructor to rank the vocabulary inventories obtained from specialised corpora so that the materials derived from them can be graded according to the students’ needs.
Proyectos de innovación docente: curso 2017/2018. Cartagena: Universidad Politécnica, CRAI Biblioteca., 2018
Este capítulo recoge el trabajo realizado por los miembros del proyecto de innovación docente den... more Este capítulo recoge el trabajo realizado por los miembros del proyecto de innovación docente denominado Elaboración de un corpus de términos y frases para la docencia en inglés, iniciado en el curso 2014/15 y continuado en el 2017/18. El proyecto está destinado a la mejora y fomento de las enseñanzas bilingües en particular, y a la mejora de la comunicación en inglés en el ámbito universitario en general. Como resultado del proyecto se ha obtenido un corpus lingüístico, disponible en la web http://inglesuniversitario.upct.es/, con la intención de facilitar la expresión en lengua inglesa a los docentes que impartan sus asignaturas en inglés, como para los alumnos que reciban docencia en este idioma. El corpus está articulado en tres niveles o subcorpus: lenguaje del aula, expresiones matemáticas, y lenguaje especializado. El corpus pretende cubrir el lenguaje que se utilizado verdaderamente en las asignaturas recogidas, el lenguaje apropiado para expresarse en situaciones habituales en el ámbito universitario y en diferentes servicios universitarios. Las entradas están disponibles en inglés y español, de modo que puede ser de utilidad para alumnos extranjeros.
El uso de corpus especializados para la enseñanza del Inglés para Fines Específicos (IFE), su aná... more El uso de corpus especializados para la enseñanza del Inglés para Fines Específicos (IFE), su análisis lingüístico o su traducción está muy extendido pues se trata de fuentes fiables de vocabulario que reflejan el uso real que de éste hacen los miembros de la comunidad especializada proporcionando al analista, enseñante o traductor la posibilidad de estudiar la lengua desde una perspectiva descriptiva. Sin embargo, el número de corpus especializados existente es muy reducido y su accesibilidad prácticamente nula. Hoy en día, la incorporación de las TIC en el análisis del lenguaje ha facilitado enormemente el manejo de cantidades de datos imposibles de procesar de manera manual. El uso de métodos de extracción automática (ATR en inglés) para la identificación de términos específicos en los corpus especializados es una de las múltiples aplicaciones de las TIC en el análisis del lenguaje. Este estudio presenta la aplicación de uno de estos métodos para la identificación de la terminología específica, diseñado por Chung (2003), en dos corpus especializados, UKSCC (United Kingdom Supreme Court Corpus) y TEC (Telecommunication Engineering Corpus), de 2,6 y 2,2 millones de palabras respectivamente, diseñados y compilados ad hoc con este fin.
ISSC-EUSER 16th International Conference on Social Sciences. Paris, 23-24 November 2018 (p.104_110)., 2018
The teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) poses numerous challenges for instructors, am... more The teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) poses numerous challenges for instructors, among which the design of a syllabus for courses that may be highly specific. This paper describes and discusses an actual instance of syllabus design that contemplates the joint use of authentic materials and commercially available textbooks. Created for an undergraduate-level Technical English course, the curriculum in question has an array of specially-selected TED Talks as its core. The talks-short lectures delivered in English by world-leading scientists, engineers and technologists at live events-combine scientific rigour with a dynamic style of presentation; this-it is argued in the work-allows for engaging the students' attention as well as introducing them to the use of English in technical contexts. The contents drawn from the talks are supplemented with specific classroom exercises and activities that are gathered from existing, commercially-available Technical English textbooks. An illustration of the way in which the different materials are used in the course is provided herein by means of a discussion of one of the course's sessions.
Actas del I Congreso Internacional de Innovación docente. Cartagena: Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena., 2011
The implementation of the Bologna Reform at Spanish universities has brought about major changes ... more The implementation of the Bologna Reform at Spanish universities has brought about major changes amongst which the use of foreign languages has become a key issue within the concept of a European area of higher education. Moreover, the idea of internationalisation is one of the fundamental goals of the “Campus Mare Nostrum” integrated by the Universities of Murcia and Cartagena. Henceforth, a language of communication is required to develop such concept in the fields of research and teaching and English appears to be the major vehicular language or lingua franca. This paper explores the possibilities offered by specialised language corpora for the planning and elaboration of didactic materials to teach English as a specialised language within the fields of Telecommunications Engineering and Law. Two specific corpora will be studied: TEC (Telecommunication Engineering English Corpus) and BLaRC (British Law Report Corpus) designed, compiled and analysed for research purposes. Special attention will be paid to such questions as frequency rates or keyness, amongst others, as determining factors to identify the core vocabulary of both specialised languages, a point of departure for the creation of new didactic materials.
Quaderns de Filología Inglesa: Estudis Lingüístics, 2017
Abstract: The features of specialised languages have been extensively described by scholars in th... more Abstract: The features of specialised languages have been extensively described by scholars in the literature. Amongst them, Enrique Alcaraz's work stands out as an exhaustive and comprehensive description of EPAP at all linguistic levels: lexical, syntactic , semantic and pragmatic. This research aims to provide a bottom-up assessment of his description on a lexical level through the implementation of corpus-based techniques on two specialised corpora of legal and telecommunications English. The results support Alcaraz's portrayal as regards term usage, the relevance of sub-technical vocabulary , the peculiarities of Latin single and multi-word terms in legal English and the significant presence and usage of abbreviations in telecommunications English.
This article suggests a new approach for the semantic description of “sub-technical terms” applyi... more This article suggests a new approach for the semantic description of “sub-technical terms” applying Cantos and Sánchez’s (2001) Lexical Constellation model, which allows for a visual representation of the path they follow towards specialisation. Various authors highlight the use of sub-technical terms as an outstanding feature of the legal lexicon. This study attests that almost half of the terms in a legal corpus of 8.85 million words overlap with general English vocabulary lists such as West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) or the British National Corpus (BNC) most common 3,000 words of English. Therefore, given the relevance of these terms within this ESP variety and the lack of proposals for their analysis, an attempt is made to try and account for such a complex phenomenon adopting a semantic and a corpus-based perspective. This is achieved employing a qualitative and quantitative methodology for the description of the process of specialisation of the sub-technical legal term “charge”, used to exemplify our model of analysis.
The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a le... more The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a legal English corpus of judicial decisions. The authors, lecturers of this ESP variety, decided to engage into specific corpus design due to the small variety of teaching materials and corpora available. Judicial decisions are essential wheels in the legal machinery of common law systems and, precisely because of that fact, they are fundamental as a legal genre. This is why we intend to compile a 6m word legal corpus of UK judicial decisions in order to establish the core vocabulary of the genre and use it for further linguistic analysis and the elaboration of didactic materials.
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Teaching methodologies are also being revised and changed to meet the requirements established by the new Higher Education system within the framework of the Bologna Process. Multidisciplinary practice is strongly promoted and there is an increasing awareness of the need to integrate content and language in the domain-specific courses. In the realms of technology and telecommunication, the scarcity of ESP textbooks is singularly surprising, regarding the leading role that English performs today as a lingua franca, and the number of universities which offer a degree in telecommunication engineering. On the contrary, it may not seem so surprising, due to the accelerated development of the field, where there is a constant creation of new concepts and the subsequent coinage of new terms that might become obsolescent overnight. In addition, the domain might seem too specific to raise the interest of publishing companies. All in all, a representative common core vocabulary of the subdisciplinary fields in telecommunications, properly sequenced in a coursebook, is mostly appreciated and rewarding for teaching, learning and testing. Corpus Linguistics tools and analyses provide better quality information about how words are used in specific contexts on the basis of frequency data required for measures of vocabulary size.
At the UPCT, one among so many universities which are still adapting to Bologna directives, some ESP teachers are actively involved in educational projects and workshops, with the aim to develop teaching materials in accordance with the renewed methodology. The first evident result is this textbook, designed to agree with the new demands and linguistic needs as defined both by the concrete teaching demands of our university and the European standards.
With the help of such a valuable research tool as a computerized corpus on telecommunication language , the present text is designed for students of telecommunication and telematic engineering, with the general objective of favouring the transition from level B1 to B2 of the European Language Passport, always within the specific domain of the telecommunications. The variety of activities it proposes, both through its units and appendices, gives evidence, in its turn, of the ambitious teaching scope it aims to cover, where theoretical and practical lessons, cooperative learning activities, self- and coevaluation proposals and tasks involving different skills (reading, writing, listening and interaction) are included.
With regard to the generic competences that the text deals with, those that fundamentally apply here are the following,
GENERIC COMPETENCES INTENSIFICATION LEVEL
Instrumental: Oral and written comprehension of a foreign language 1 (Indispensable)
Interpersonal: Groupwork / Interpersonal abilities 2 (Necessary)
Systemic: Ability to learn / Ability to work autonomously 3 (Advisable)
being the specific competences not so relevant here, as we must not forget that, for telecommunication students, English is mainly a tool, although one of great importance.
Finally, we would like to thank the university organism that has backed our work, the Vicerrectorado de Convergencia Europea, as well as its responsible at the time, Josefina García León, for her pertinent suggestions; and we would also like to thank our dear colleague Ruth Herrero, who has closely followed this project, for the support given and for her enthusiasm towards the teaching praxis; and finally, many thanks to Javier Toledo for his invaluable help in the editing process of this work.
The authors .
Cartagena, June 2010.
Teaching methodologies are also being revised and changed to meet the requirements established by the new Higher Education system within the framework of the Bologna Process. Multidisciplinary practice is strongly promoted and there is an increasing awareness of the need to integrate content and language in the domain-specific courses. In the realms of technology and telecommunication, the scarcity of ESP textbooks is singularly surprising, regarding the leading role that English performs today as a lingua franca, and the number of universities which offer a degree in telecommunication engineering. On the contrary, it may not seem so surprising, due to the accelerated development of the field, where there is a constant creation of new concepts and the subsequent coinage of new terms that might become obsolescent overnight. In addition, the domain might seem too specific to raise the interest of publishing companies. All in all, a representative common core vocabulary of the subdisciplinary fields in telecommunications, properly sequenced in a coursebook, is mostly appreciated and rewarding for teaching, learning and testing. Corpus Linguistics tools and analyses provide better quality information about how words are used in specific contexts on the basis of frequency data required for measures of vocabulary size.
At the UPCT, one among so many universities which are still adapting to Bologna directives, some ESP teachers are actively involved in educational projects and workshops, with the aim to develop teaching materials in accordance with the renewed methodology. The first evident result is this textbook, designed to agree with the new demands and linguistic needs as defined both by the concrete teaching demands of our university and the European standards.
With the help of such a valuable research tool as a computerized corpus on telecommunication language , the present text is designed for students of telecommunication and telematic engineering, with the general objective of favouring the transition from level B1 to B2 of the European Language Passport, always within the specific domain of the telecommunications. The variety of activities it proposes, both through its units and appendices, gives evidence, in its turn, of the ambitious teaching scope it aims to cover, where theoretical and practical lessons, cooperative learning activities, self- and coevaluation proposals and tasks involving different skills (reading, writing, listening and interaction) are included.
With regard to the generic competences that the text deals with, those that fundamentally apply here are the following,
GENERIC COMPETENCES INTENSIFICATION LEVEL
Instrumental: Oral and written comprehension of a foreign language 1 (Indispensable)
Interpersonal: Groupwork / Interpersonal abilities 2 (Necessary)
Systemic: Ability to learn / Ability to work autonomously 3 (Advisable)
being the specific competences not so relevant here, as we must not forget that, for telecommunication students, English is mainly a tool, although one of great importance.
Finally, we would like to thank the university organism that has backed our work, the Vicerrectorado de Convergencia Europea, as well as its responsible at the time, Josefina García León, for her pertinent suggestions; and we would also like to thank our dear colleague Ruth Herrero, who has closely followed this project, for the support given and for her enthusiasm towards the teaching praxis; and finally, many thanks to Javier Toledo for his invaluable help in the editing process of this work.
The authors .
Cartagena, June 2010.
1st author Camino Rea Rizzo
2nd author María José Marín
Internationalization is one of the main aims of today’s Spanish universities. According to the Strategy for the Internationalization of Spanish Universities 2015-2020 (MECD), internationalization is defined as the process to integrate an international, intercultural and global dimension into the aims, functions and development of Higher Education. University teaching offer is found on the bases for internationalization considered in three stages: i) development of mobility, ii) internationalization of degree programmes and iii) Institutional internationalization.
In 2010 the Technical University of Cartagena (UPCT), through the International Excellence Campus Mare Nostrum 37/38, took on the challenge of promoting teaching in English and taking measures to provide teachers with the necessary resources to teach content subjects in English as part of the official offer in degree and master programmes. Since then, different lines of action have been developed for this purpose: certification of English proficiency, training and incentivization.
Consistent with this policy, the UPCT’s internationalization plan (2017/2020) pursues to increase the number of bilingual programmes (English and Spanish) by promoting the offer of at least one bilingual itinerary, where a minimum of 50% credits are available in English, per University Centre. The groundwork for bilingual teaching or itineraries is incipiently found within the Campus Mare Nostrum subprogramme which defines the objective of planning subjects, designing teaching materials and performing the preparatory actions required to implement teaching in English in the following academic year. Precisely in this preparatory stage, an important lack was observed by the body of teachers involved in the project. They were missing a language tool to resort to when they needed to use the so-called classroom language and the vocabulary related to a university context like horas de tutoría, convocatoria de examen, aula virtual, etc. Hence, the language tool was envisioned in order to provide a work tool and a language resource for teaching in English which, in turn, facilitates communication and understanding between teachers and students. The tool covers three broad categories dealing with i) the classroom language, composed of four subcategories: informal talks among colleagues and students; conversations between teacher and student in the classroom; conversations during a personal tutorial; and conversations about administrative topics, ii) the basic mathematical language shared by technical subjects, divided into solving equations; notation and connectors; coordinate axes and graphical representation; and operations and functions, and iii) the specialized technical language of the contents subjects available in English (20 specializations).
This work describes the development of the language tool from its beginning in 2015/16 as a compilation of language samples in a linguistic corpus, the parameters governing its systematization into a database, until its final outcome available on the webpage http://inglesuniversitario.upct.es
corpora will be studied: TEC (Telecommunication Engineering English Corpus) and BLaRC (British Law Report Corpus) designed, compiled and analysed for research purposes. Special attention will be paid to such questions as frequency rates or keyness, amongst others, as determining factors to identify the core vocabulary of both specialised
languages, a point of departure for the creation of new didactic materials.