Using Specialized Corpora in Teaching English for Specific Purposes to Students of Posgraduate Engineering Program

The purpose of the study was to assess the prospects of applying the corpus-based approach to teaching subject-specific terminology to postgraduate students. The study involved conducting an experiment, during which the participants were assigned to the control and experimental groups. The control group was taught using the traditional approach, while the experimental group learned to use corpus technologies and completed vocabulary tasks that required addressing corpora. In addition, participants in the experimental group developed do-it-yourself (DIY) corpora using AntConc software to expand the vocabulary related to the topics of their scientific research. The results show that postgraduate students who were taught using the corpus-based approach significantly improved their reading and writing skills and retained the subject-specific vocabulary better. The survey data indicate an overall positive attitude among postgraduate students towards using corpora. The developed exercises can be of value to subsequent postgraduate degree programs and master degree programs if adapted.