A pedagogically-oriented corpus-based study of keywords and key terms in English used in the automotive industry and their usefulness for vocational secondary school EFL students

Abstract

The lack of up-to-date authentic teaching materials is one of the problems in teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at Polish secondary vocational schools. This corpus-based study, focusing on English automotive discourse, is intended to fill this gap and its goal is twofold. First, we aim to identify and describe discoursal functions of keywords and key terms found in a purpose-designed 1-million-word corpus comprising car reviews, car brochures, scripts from a motoring TV programme and excerpts from car owner’s manuals concerning safety. Second, by using questionnaires administered to teachers and calculating inter-rater agreement, we aim to identify those keywords and key terms that are the most pedagogically-useful. The study findings reveal a high degree of linguistic variation within the four text types found in the corpus of English automotive texts and provide pedagogically-useful vocabulary items that may be used in teaching ESP to car mechanics in vocational schools or in the automotive industry at large.