Designing CLIL teaching activities. The impact of corpus analysis software on the study and teaching of specialised English lexicon and language patterning

Despite the growing interest of corpus linguistic studies in the production of dictionaries, grammars and other FL teaching materials (Tomlinson 2003, Mishan 2005), the potential of corpora and of corpus linguistics methodologies is still not exploited enough for the creation of LSP course activities and in particular CLIL. Nevertheless, several studies have recently proved the importance of corpus-based activities in language acquisition (cf. among others, Cobb 1999, Aston 2001, Sun and Wang 2003, Sinclair 2004, Aston et al. 2004, Bernardini 2004, Chambers 2007, Breyer 2009, Reppen 2010, Römer 2011). Not only is this paper intended to show that the use of corpora “can strengthen natural processes of language acquisition” (Johansson 2009: 39), but it also aims at illustrating how corpus linguistics may provide non-linguistic subject teachers (or, at least, CLIL teams made up of NLS and FL teachers) with new pedagogical and methodological tools. The paper aims at showing specific potential uses of the corpus linguistics methodologies for the creation of teaching activities/tasks with particular reference to the concrete application of analyses of English lexicon and language patterning. For this purpose, different specialised corpora will be explored through the Sketch Engine software and a set of different case studies will be taken into account, as for example i) the corpus analysis of conventionalised patterns and productivity features, and ii) the use of concordances and n-grams for the study of English lexicon and phrase/sentence structure.