Designing CLIL teaching activities. The impact of corpus analysis software on the study and teaching of specialised English lexicon and language patterning

This chapter focuses on the language of learning/study, identifiable with Cummins’ CALP language. The authors show how content and language acquisition can benefit from the use of corpora, corpus linguistics methodologies and software. The interpretation of the fil rouge of this publication, i.e., learning enhancement induced by technologies, allows the two authors to exhibit all the potential of corpus-driven analyses not only for intensive reading comprehension but also for the creation of teaching activities/tasks exploiting the English lexicon and language patterning. For this purpose, various specialised corpora are explored through the Sketch Engine software and some case studies are presented referring to i) the corpus analysis of conventionalised patterns and productivity features, and ii) the use of concordances and n-grams. Difficult as it might seem at school level the application of computational linguistics should become a must at university level both in the national tongue and in the language of internationalized diplomas.