Developing Language for Specific Purposes Materials with Thematic Corpora

The aim of this article is to describe the process of autonomous creation of pedagogical materials for teaching languages for special purposes based on thematic corpora. It presents methods of creating one’s own thematic corpora from previously collected texts or by automatically extracting content from the Internet. Popular and easily accessible tools for compiling and analysing do-it-yourself corpora are also indicated. Finally, examples of typical language tasks prepared on the basis of corpus data are discussed, as well as tasks requiring analysis of corpus data by the learner (data-driven learning). In order to illustrate the described practices, thematic corpora and corpus-based teaching materials created within the framework of the European Erasmus+ project called Teaching English as a Content Subject at the Tertiary Level (TE-Con3) are presented.