CREATING AN AVIATION ENGLISH LESSON: A CORPUS-INFORMED MATERIAL DESIGN

Abstract

Since ESP materials call for authenticity and specific content related to the field, books available on the market are sometimes thought to be inadequate for students’ target situations. As a subset of ESP, aviation English in this instance demands teachers to create teaching materials that cater to the students’ needs, wants, and necessities. For many teachers, creating course materials in the aviation setting continues to be challenging. As a result, this article offers an alternative approach to designing aviation English lessons using the corpus. There are essentially two approaches to designing corpus-based material: direct and indirect. Nevertheless, combining the two approaches can be a new challenge in getting students interested in the learning activity. A corpus-data-driven learning activity is created and embedded in a lesson. This activity potentially involves students examining the linguistic patterns, lexical categories, word frequencies, synonyms, and other pertinent vocabulary tasks in the corpus. The activity exerts a considerable influence on enhancing their vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary size. Alternatively, aviation English teachers offer an indirect approach by selecting reading materials from the free online corpus, such as, among others, COCA. Choosing a text from the corpus is believed to ensure the text’s authenticity. The teachers can automatically generate word or phraseology lists related to the field being learned from the text. Here, the corpus assists aviation English teachers in choosing suitable vocabulary for aviation students. This article highlights the approach of corpus-informed material design in an aviation context.