Development of an ESP E-learning Tool Using In-House Corpora

This study introduces a methodology for developing an elearning tool by using corpora and computer software for linguistic analysis. The corpora compiled for this study are of journal articles from two engineering fields, and of articles from general science magazines. Each corpus, consisting of approximately 500000 words, is tagged and parsed. Analysis of these corpora reveals that the past participle form has high frequency among verb forms. Therefore, sentences including this form are extracted, and items asking the main verb were made with them. Students answered for 37,333 sentences in total. The analysis of answers shows that students tend to answer incorrectly for items in longer sentences, and items whose main verb is located toward the end. Individual analysis of each student was also conducted. This kind of analysis can help language teachers to provide targeted practice for students, using authentic, discipline-specific textual data.