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The use of linguistic corpora in language teaching has spread considerably in the last twenty-five years thanks to the pioneer work by Johns [1], who coined the term data-driven learning (DDL, henceforth); Sinclair [2], who developed the concept further on; or Boulton [3], amongst others. DDL teaching methods promote language study based on the observation of concordances, that is, examples of the authentic use of keywords in context (KWC), which are retrieved from a linguistic corpus by running software programs specifically designed to that end, such as Wordsmith [4].

According to the literature on the subject, there exist arguments for and against the use of corpora in language teaching and there has been a fairly small number of pedagogical experiments in English for specific purposes (ESP) [3], particularly in the field of telecommunication English. This work suggests two activities for teaching terminology within this area applying DDL-based methodology, together with a pedagogical experimental model for its future implementation. Such activities are not intended to substitute any other teaching material like course books, they are rather envisaged as a supplement to language exposure and/or reinforcement of terminology. The language samples of this specialised variety are stored in the Telecommunication English Corpus (TEC) [5], designed and compiled ad hoc for language research owing to the scarcity of technical corpora available.

[1] Johns, T. (1986).Microconcord: A language-learner’s research tool. System, 14 (2), 151–162.

[2] Sinclair, J. 2003. Reading Concordances: An Introduction. London: Longman.

[3] Boulton, A. (2012). Corpus consultation for ESP. A review of empirical research. In Boulton, A., Carter-Thomas, S., Rowley-Jolivet, E. (eds.) Corpus-Informed Research and Learning in ESP. Issues and Applications (261-292). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

[4] Scott, M. (2008). WordSmith Tools version 5 [computer software]. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.

[5] Rea, C. (2008). El inglés de las telecomunicaciones: estudio léxico basado en un corpus específico. Tesis doctoral. http://www.tesisenred.net/TDR-0611109-134048/index_cs.html>