Establishing some tentative principles for corpus-based ESP courses

There have been only a handful of studies that investigated how corpora can be used as tools to facilitate learner autonomy in dealing with various specialized corpora (Charles, 2012; 2014; Crosthwaite, Wong, & Cheung, 2019; Lee & Swales, 2006). The presentation reports on a study that extends earlier research by analysing perceived usefulness of corpora and corpus use for autonomous language learning after two iterations of a corpus-based ESP course. The study investigated 1) how learners perceive corpus use in general; 2) whether learners used their DIY corpora autonomously after the courses; 3) whether learners used online corpora and corpus analysis tools autonomously after the course; and 4) what learners used online corpora and corpus analysis tools for autonomously. The study applied a mixed-methods approach. Data was collected by focus group interviews, by the analysis of written student reports and questionnaires five months after the end of the courses.Overall, findings show that as a result of both courses students found corpora very useful. They considered corpora helpful not only for the purposes of the corpus-based ESP course, but they saw long-term potential in corpus use for language learning. Based on the results tentative principles of design and implementation of corpus-based ESP courses are proposed for future syllabus design with direct and autonomous corpus use.