[Corpora-List] Plea for help

[Ute Römer]

Dear Rafiq and others interested in business English,

I am just reading a very good dissertation that might be of interest to you:
Nelson, Mike. 2000. A Corpus-Based Study of Business English and Business
English Teaching Materials. Available online at
http://www.kielikanava.com/thesis.html (it was announced on this list about
a year ago maybe but it's definitely worth mentioning again). Mike Nelson
gives a detailed account of his comparative lexis-centred analysis of
general English, business English, and business English textbooks. I think
this is an extremely interesting and very well-researched thesis; it will
probably provide you with lots of ideas of how to get started and how to
structure your work (it certainly helped me structure my thesis, so many
thanks again to Mike for putting the thesis online! However, I hope that I
won't end up with almost 600 pages like Mike did...).

Have a good week everyone!
All the best... Ute


----- Original Message -----
From: "Isa Abdul kaader" <I.Abdul-kaader at postgrad.umist.ac.uk>
To: "geoffrey.williams" <geoffrey.williams at wanadoo.fr>
Cc: <CORPORA at HD.UIB.NO>
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 1:54 AM
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Plea for help


> Hi Geoffrey,
>
>     Many thanks for your suggestions, Geoffrey and to all the others who
gave
> such wonderful advise with books etc for me to get an understanding of
Corpus
> Linguistics.
>
>    Having understood the essentials, have decided to focus on attention on
> academic writing especially
> 1. Business Writing ( letters of compliant and adjustment) and /or
> 2. Technical Report writing ( could be hardware/software developemnt in
higher
> technical institutions).
>
>
>     Apart from the critical study in langauge teaching materials by
Kennedy (
> 1987a) Holmes ( 1988), Mindt ( 1992) and especially Conrad ( 1996b)who
dealt
> with academic text and corpus based techniques, ARE there any other study
that
> looks at specialized registers like business writing and technical
reports.
>
>      Have yet to get full access to BNC but would like to know if such
corpora
> ( registers) could be obtained from the "Official document and Academic
Prose"
> listing in the BNC index to compare the linguistic characteristics of the
> corpus that I wish to compile.
>
>      I want to compile a small corpus (20,000 to 30,000) with regard to
the
> register listed. I do NOT KNOW how to get started with this.  Need all
help
> with this.
>
>       In short, I am interested in compiling a corpus to study its
> characteristics and applications to exploit it to design best possible
> materials and activities to help my students understand and produce the
> registers listed above appropriately (helping students with language that
is
> actually used in these settings).
>
>      Keen to know research that states appropriateness and potential of
> corpus ( including collacations) in Computer Assisted Langauge Learning at
> higher insitutions especially to teach technical writing.
>
> Very many thanks in advance for your all your help.
>
> Rafiq
> Temsek Polytechnic
> Singapore
>