Corpora and the concordancer in learning ESP: an experiment in a course for interpreters and transaltors

While Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) obviously plays a central role for students who are preparing to become professional interpreters and translators, it consitutes a major teaching/learning problem. In this paper I discuss a pedagogic experiment where concordance analysis of electronic text corpora was used in a course of medical English for students of interpreting and translation at the University of Bologna. Students were engaged in activities of corpus creation and analysis, followong the approach described in Johns (1991, 1994). Concordances were used to observe typical langauge organizations and also to try and grasp specific medical concepts and procedures.