Foreword

1Caroline Rossi, université Grenoble Alpes

2While corpora have been used extensively in translator training for a few decades (Beeby et al. 2009; Zanettin et al. 2013), applications to the English for specific purposes (ESP) classroom have remained relatively scarce. However, a recent meta-analysis into “the effectiveness of using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for L2 learning or use” (Boulton & Cobb 2017) has reported effective use of corpora with learners of a foreign language for both general and specific purposes, especially in writing instruction (see also Chen & Flowerdew 2018). In a recent book, Charles and Frankenberg-Garcia (2021) present seven studies which focus on the preparation, exploitation and analysis of corpora for ESP writing instruction.

3Against this background, Julie McAllister's contribution appears as both original and extremely useful. The originality lies in the course's situation within the French academic context – a rare occurrence indeed, and one that is nowhere to be found in the seven studies included in M. Charles and A. Frankenberg-Garcia's book. Even though the course is not specific to the French applied foreign languages department (LEA) in which it was developed, the successful coordination of this ESP class with a financial management class is certainly inspiring. The focus on LEA students with little to no training in linguistics is also a challenge that many French colleagues are familiar with.

4The contribution shows the benefits of using an extra-small corpus, in a highly controlled setting where students are explained how corpus tools work and presented with results for further analysis. This approach is especially welcome in the current context, since uncontrolled, generalised access to the Web as Corpus (WaC) or to online corpora and concordances (with little to no mention of sources) can induce confusion among students, not to mention machine translation outputs and online dictionaries (Raído et al. 2019; Giampieri 2019).

5Finally, the contribution offers important insights into distance teaching during the COVID-19 lockdown: it shows the successful operationalisation of project-based teaching using a videoconferencing tool, as well as the limitations that this setting involves, making theoretical teaching almost impossible.

Beeby, Allison, Patricia Rodrígues Inés & Pilar Sánchez-Gijón (eds.). 2009. Corpus Use and Translating: Corpus Use for Learning to Translate and Learning Corpus Use to Translate. John Benjamins Publishing.

Boulton, Alex & Tom Cobb. 2017. Corpus use in language learning: A meta-analysis. Language Learning 67:2, 348–393. DOI: 10.1111/lang.12224

Chen, Meilin & John Flowerdew. 2018. A critical review of research and practice in data-driven learning (DDL) in the academic writing classroom. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23:3, 335–369. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.16130.che

Charles, Maggie & Ana Frankenberg-Garcia (eds.). 2021. Corpora in ESP/EAP Writing Instruction: Preparation, Exploitation, Analysis. Routledge.

Giamperi, Patrizia. 2019. The web as corpus in ESL classes: A case study. International Journal of Language Studies 13:2, 91-108.

Raído, Vanessa Enríquez, Frank Austermühl & Marina Sánchez Torrón. 2019. Computer-assisted L2 learning and translation (CAL2T). In S. Laviosa & M. González-Davies (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education. Routledge, 278-299.

Zanettin, Frederico, Silvia Bernardini & Dominic Stewart. 2014. Corpora in Translator Education. Routledge.

1. The setting

6The university of Nantes has a strong and vibrant applied foreign languages department (Langues étrangères appliquées – LEA), which places students’ future career prospects at the heart of its courses, particularly its Master’s programme. Entry to the Master’s programme is highly competitive: Out of 300 applicants approximately 80 students are selected each year after participating in an interview process which tests their multilingualism and business domain knowledge. The two-year Master’s programme combines the study of languages, culture and targeted business subjects and offers four specialisations: International trade, International logistics and Supply chain management, International business hospitality tourism and Internationalisation of small to medium-sized businesses. Language teaching in LEA is carefully tailored to the specific needs of those business areas in terms of linguistic and professional skills and communication events. Our strong links with local, national and international businesses mean that the programme retains a strong practical focus as well as exploring theoretical aspects.

7This contribution examines the design and implementation of an English for specific purposes (ESP) class aimed at second-year Master’s students (M2) specialising in International trade. It involved 19 students (18 females and 1 male) who had all attained a B2 or C1 proficiency level according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The course ran over nine weeks for a total of 22 hours of which 10 hours were positioned at the end of semester 1 and the remaining 12 hours during January 2021 (semester 2) before students left on a six-month internship. I have been teaching this course for three years. Traditionally, it takes place face-to-face, but given the Covid-19 crisis and the fact that France had just entered its second lockdown, the delivery mode was transformed in order to adapt to the situation. Hence, the course was delivered entirely online via the application Zoom. The course also used Google docs for the co-constructing and sharing of students’ written productions as well as the Moodle platform for communicating course materials and uploading assignments to the students.

2. Objectives

9Bhatia (2008) highlights the importance of an integrated approach bringing together professional genres and professional practices to ensure that students are not only able to recognise and handle textual features of specialist professional genres, but can also apply this knowledge in the real professional world. The ESP course for M2 students in international trade attempts to bridge this gap. Its aims are twofold:

1. to promote students’ understanding of the linguistic underpinnings of specialised promotional discourse;

2. to help students harness this knowledge to improve their English writing skills in the field of marketing.

10By introducing specific discourse analysis techniques, tools and tasks, the course adopts an integrated approach to foster students’ language development. Specifically, the syllabus of the ESP class focuses on identifying and analysing lexical, rhetorical and stylistic features of promotional discourse, which students can then apply to their writing tasks. Together with a number of colleagues in the LEA department, we believe that this linguistics approach can help differentiate LEA students from their counterparts in business schools and University schools of management (IAE). However, one problem is that LEA students do not generally know much about linguistics and do not aim to become linguists.

3. Pedagogical approach and tools

3.1. Theoretical background

11To achieve the aforementioned aims, the course draws on theories and methods across different disciplines including genre and discourse analysis (Swales 1990; Bhatia 2004, 2008) and corpus linguistics, particularly data-driven learning (Boulton 2012, 2014) in applied linguistics, but also persuasive discourse in the fields of sociology and anthropology (Shaw 2006; Danesi 2015) and brand identity and brand personality concepts in marketing research (Aaker 1997; Batra et al. 2008). In the area of didactics, a number of guiding principles were adopted for the design of the course including task-based learning (Bygate et al. 2001; Ellis 2003; Van den Branden 2006) and project-based pedagogies (Perrenoud 1998). Accordingly, students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects which are authentic to them and by interacting with other learners. Perrenoud (1998) highlights the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of a project-based approach as well as its constitutive elements: group work, tasks with clearly defined timelines and outcomes in the form of a production and the mobilisation of decision-making, planning and coordination skills. The learners also need to feel in charge and active. The M2 students’ project to create, market and manage a company, as defined in the introduction, followed these principles.

3.2. Introducing promotional discourse

12The ESP class was organised so that the students would first gain a theoretical insight into branding and promotional genres, then learn to analyse written promotional discourse pertaining to the recreational boat sector. The goal was that they would appropriate the results of their analysis for their own writing purposes later. An overview of the class organisation and progression over the nine weeks is presented in Appendix 1. The analysis aimed to give them an insight into the communicative methods, values and priorities of the discourse community, as well as the structural and linguistic features of the print advertisement genre (Bhatia 2004). As Danesi (2015: 1) notes, each brand “has developed its own discourse style to match the social image it intends to create and disseminate as part of its marketing strategy”. Thus, before starting work on the promotional brochure writing task, students needed to be introduced to basic rhetorical structures of promotional genre, as none of them had had any previous instruction in this area. The communicative purpose of promotional discourse, as highlighted by Bhatia (2004: 63), is “to inform and promote in order to sell ideas, goods or services to a selected group of people”. According to Bhatia (2004), print advertisements and sales promotion materials make use of nine typical rhetorical moves to persuade potential customers to buy the product that is being promoted:

1. Headlines (for reader attraction)

2. Targeting the market

3. Justifying the product or service

4. Detailing the product or service

5. Establishing the credentials

6. Celebrity or typical user endorsement

7. Offering incentives

8. Using pressure techniques

9. Soliciting a response

13The first step was for students to carry out a manual analysis of a small specialised corpus comprised of 2,050 English words taken from a promotional brochure of Groupe Beneteau, a worldwide market leader for boats (see figure 1). The 44-page French and English brochure was obtained via the company website. During an online Zoom session (see Appendix 1 – session 5), students analysed the brochure for the presence of the nine rhetorical moves, identifying seven out of the nine moves listed above. Moves 7 & 8 (incentives and pressure tactics) were not present in this brochure. Students also investigated the visual techniques used to attract the reader’s attention and to enhance the effectiveness of the promotional text (such as bold or capitalised headings and subheadings, attractive images), which also served as a persuasion technique by emphasising the experiential benefits of the product, although this was not the focus of the analysis. Having carried out a macro-analysis of the Beneteau brochure, students then moved on to studying and describing the linguistic content specific to the specialised promotional genre.

3.3. Using corpus tools and techniques

14One of the most important moves in promotional discourse is move 4, that is to say offering a product description and evaluation that is good, positive and favourable (Bhatia 2004). The move seeks to influence and persuade the target audience by giving a detailed product description that differentiates a company’s product from its competitors and shows it in a positive light thus making it desirable. The promotional purpose is achieved by the use of evaluative language, which is defined by Hunston (2011: 1) as “language which indexes the act of evaluation or the act of stance-taking. It expresses an attitude towards a person, situation or other entity and is both subjective and located within a societal value system”. For the purpose of this study, evaluative language indicates attitudes and judgements about a product and aims to persuade the target audience that the viewpoint of the company is correct. It is an important technique for achieving persuasiveness in promotional discourse. Hunston (2011) points out that adjectives and adverbs frequently express evaluative meaning. Emotive language is another rhetorical strategy whose distinctive feature is persuasion through the appeal to emotions. Thus, the next step was for students to carry out a micro-analysis of the language used in the brochure, with the goal of identifying language and techniques for achieving persuasiveness in promotional discourse and applying those in practice in their writing.

16The LancsLex tool enabled students to explore the lexical composition of the Beneteau brochure text by comparing it to the New general service list (new-GSL) that identifies 2,490 most frequent words in the English language (Brezina & Gablasova 2015). This list was derived from analysis of four language corpora of the total size of over 12 billion running words (including the British National Corpus and EnTenTen12). The tool provides insights into the lexical diversity and complexity of texts and helps students identify “specialised vocabulary” in a text (rare words which do not appear in the new-GSL). Lexical complexity or sophistication is an important component of writing proficiency, particularly in professional ESP writing. The tool also analyses texts grammatically and identifies word classes. The results derived from LancLex’s processing of the corpus, as shown in figures 2 and 3, were presented to students for interpretation during session five of the Zoom classes (see Appendix 1).

17The tool calculated that approximately 68% of the 2,050-word corpus was made up of frequent words from the new-GSL, which meant about a third of the text (32%) was composed of “specialised vocabulary”. Figure 2 shows a visual representation of the text after processing by LancsLex. The words in black are the specialist words, while the words in orange (or grey in the print version) are common and frequently used words that can be found in the new-GSL. The words in bold orange (or bold grey in the print version) are the first 500 words of the new-GSL, that is to say the most frequently used words. The students analysed this output during the Zoom class and were able to identify that the “specialised vocabulary” related to attributes of the product (safety, power, acceleration, comfort, performance, seaworthiness, reliability, efficiency) or to physical components of the product (hull, aft, cabinet, upholstery, beam, handrails, deck, foredeck, storage cabin, berth, port walkway) as well as to technical details (measurements, certification). The “specialised vocabulary” also included a number of elaborate adjectives, which are discussed below. This exercise therefore helped achieve one of the key goals which was to introduce them to the language used by the boating discourse community.

18The LancsLex tool segments the frequent words into three groups: the 500 most frequent words in the new-GSL, the 1,000 most frequent words and, finally, the 2,500 words. Figure 3 shows a breakdown of the word classes in the Beneteau brochure and the proportion of words which fits into these different segments. The table shows that specialist language is mainly in the noun and adjective groups. A closer look at the table shows the high proportion of adjectives in this promotional text: 238 for 739 nouns. In other words, there is an adjective for one out of every three nouns. This is in line with Hunston’s (2011) assertion mentioned previously concerning the evaluative and persuasive functions of adjectives. The adjectives which were highlighted in figure 2 as being specialist language offer a very favourable appraisal of the product: exceptional, sleek, magic, incomparable, generous, optimised, innovative.

19To examine this aspect further, I applied the lexicometric analysis provided by the IRaMuTeQ software to the content of the brochure. This followed an approach already adopted in an M1 International Trade class as presented at the GERAS 2020 Study Day organised by Nantes University (Lavissière 2020). Based on R software (Ihaka & Gentleman 1996) and on python language, IRaMuTeQ offers a number of different types of analyses including word frequency, concordance analysis and similarity analysis, which are discussed below. Another type performed by IRaMuTeQ is the Descending hierarchical classification (DHC) technique. The software breaks down the corpus into classes or clusters of words that appear in the same context. A dendogram (see figure 4) is then produced identifying the main classes and subclasses. Main class and subclass labels show the percentage of classified text segments. This analysis offers a global approach to the corpus and helped students to visualise how the Beneteau promotional text was structured overall. As can be seen in figure 4, two distinct discourse sets emerge. Students were tasked with interpreting these data sets and the other outputs from IRaMuTeQ during a three-hour online Zoom class, which was then followed up by writing practice (see Appendix 1 - sessions 6 & 7). The first discourse set, with two related classes (class 1 and class 2), accounts for 40% of the entire classified text and groups together vocabulary relating to the technical specifications of the Beneteau Flyer boat range. The second, where there are three related classes (classes 3, 4 and 5), emphasises the practical benefits of the product for the target customers (performance, comfort, safety, space) and more specifically what the product can offer in terms of an emotional experience (pleasure, sensation, ). Students were able to see how Beneteau’s discourse sought to tap into consumers’ social needs, specifically the needs for pleasure, sociability and affiliation. The lexical similarity analysis using IRaMuTeQ offers another graphical representation of the corpus. It identifies the statistical strength of how often words co-occur in the text and the relationships between the words. The results of this analysis (Appendix 2) show that Beneteau’s discourse is highly centred around the product brand name, Flyer, around which revolves the greatest part of the lexicon of the corpus. All strong links from the different clusters converge back to the brand name.

20The frequency list produced by IRaMuTeQ followed the DHC pattern in figure 4 whereby the most frequent words tended to be technical words relating to the product (hull appears 40 times in the text, beam 38 times), followed by words associated with the experience of driving the boat (sensations appears seven times, comfort seven times, and pleasure four times). I extracted the adjectives from this automatically produced frequency list for further manual analysis by the students and also selected specific lexical items evoking emotion such as sensation, pleasure, passion, performance, style. The collocations of the items produced were pinpointed using the software. They were examined in the form of concordance lines (see Appendix 3), showing all the instances of the item in co-text, which allowed for qualitative analysis by the students and class discussion, particularly concerning the emotive dimension of the language used as a technique to persuade the audience. Students saw, for example, how the idea of sensation was linked not only to the physical sailing sensation of power and speed, but also to the emotional states of relaxation and of sharing the social experience with others. Concerning the analysis of the adjectives, students had to identify if they were evaluative or non-evaluative, then divide the evaluative adjectives into three categories: emotional (magic, wonderful, safe, generous, elegant, unlimited), quality/quantity related (light, large, wide, resistant, comfortable) and those expressing subjective positive value (incredible, beautiful, unique, sleek, perfect, exceptional, innovative, ideal). Students noted that one of the most frequently used adjectives in the Beneteau corpus was “unique” (used five times), which is commonly used in advertising to differentiate the value of one product over another. Finally, students also examined the choice of pronouns used in the corpus. The frequency list showed that the 2^nd person pronouns “you” and “yours” referring to the customer were used 15 times in the brochure copy compared to only twice for the 1^st person pronouns “we” and “our” referring to the company Beneteau. Talking directly to the customer and focusing on their needs makes the message more compelling and persuasive by actively engaging with the audience and personalising the message. Even the use of “our” was in the context of dialoguing with the customer: “Be a part of our history. Choosing Beneteau is trusting 135 years of experience and passion”. The pronoun “you” was frequently used in phrases which evoked emotion: “you can prolong the pleasure”, “you can really enjoy life aboard” and “you love getting out on the water”.

4. Results

4.1. Impact of pedagogical approach on student productions

21After completing their analysis, students composed their own writing in groups, taking into account what they had learned relating to lexicon, format, content and organisation of promotional discourse. Writing practice took place in groups both during Zoom classes using the breakout room function and outside of class time as homework. Students shared and co-constructed their productions online using Google Docs, which enabled me to work collaboratively with them providing feedback and advice directly onto their documents. A look at students’ output, namely the promotional brochure they created for their company, provides some insight into the impact of the pedagogical approach on students’ writing and learning outcomes. While I will focus here on the creation of the promotional brochure, it should be noted that it was just one of the tasks of the overall project in relation to the serious game. In the financial management class, each group of students (each company) was assessed on the following deliverables: actual financial performance, cost and margin analysis, an activity report and an oral presentation outlining business strategy and results. The ESP course assessment included for each group a ten-page brand identity statement for their company, a promotional brochure, a press release and an oral presentation outlining their marketing communications plan. The two oral presentations took place during the same Zoom session, in which students presented their business strategy in French and their marketing and branding strategy in English.

22The analysis of the five groups’ brochures in terms of application of the generic moves identified by Bhatia (2004) shows that this structural feature was well understood. The majority of the nine moves can be identified in their work. Interestingly, none of the groups incorporated moves 7 (offering incentives) and 8 (using pressure tactics) in their brochures, which was also the case of the Beneteau brochure. This demonstrates a limitation of the corpus I used. Using a larger corpus from a range of companies in the sector would have given students greater exposure to additional moves, which they may then have emulated. I was able to identify the influence of the IRaMuTeQ DHC analysis in three out of the five groups’ productions, which include both positive product evaluations and technical specifications.

23A more detailed look at a sample brochure of one of the groups shows the creativity employed by students in the use of emotive language and evaluative adjectives in their text. The front cover in figure 5 invites clients to “discover the seven seas” while the insert refers to “adventures”. These words do not appear in the original Beneteau brochure and their use would suggest that students have understood the power of emotive language and have gained versatility in their own writing. A glance inside the brochure (figure 6) shows how the group adopted some of the lexicon seen in their analysis, particularly in relation to evaluative adjectives: “a unique brand for unique boats”, “unique, resistant and innovative boats”, “beautiful and magic [sea]”, “wonderful places”. The notions of passion and trust are also taken up and developed further. This group even used bold type to highlight specific words, as we had seen in the Beneteau example. Overall, the group did not simply copy ideas they had seen from their analysis, they explored their own creativity to develop them further.

4.2. Survey results

24Students were asked to complete an anonymous post-course survey on Google Forms. The aim was to gauge whether they enjoyed the course and understand their attitudes to the programme with a view to making any necessary adjustments next year. Fourteen out of the 19 students who participated in the course replied. Students were first asked to evaluate the usefulness of different aspects of the course using a 5-point scale (where 1 is not at all useful and 5 is very useful). Their evaluations were positive. The following aspects were rated as being the most useful (4.9 out of 5): the use of authentic promotional materials for analysis, the writing task itself and the link between the English class and the business game. Studying promotional genre theories and language got the next highest score (4.2) followed by the use of specialist corpus tools (4). In terms of specific learning outcomes, students strongly agreed (between 4.4 and 4.8 out of a scale of 5) that the course helped improve their writing skills, gave them a better understanding of promotional discourse and fostered skills they could use in the workplace.

25In response to the open-ended questions relating to the strengths and weaknesses of the programme, students appreciated the action-oriented, project-based approach and the associated creativity and professional skills development focus:

“The best aspect of the course in my opinion is the final project output which I find very complete [...] Thank you for teaching us new concepts that are relevant to our field of study and that will be very useful for our professional career whatever it may be.”

“We were quite free and we could really be creative with our project, which is what I really liked. It was quite different from what we used to do […]. I learned a lot about promotional discourse and making a brochure helped my business skills.”

“The fact that we were able to analyse promotional materials because we might do some in the future was very interesting.”

26On the other hand, students reported some negative aspects particularly concerning the theoretical parts of the course and the lack of interactivity during these sessions given that students did not use the tools themselves:

“I found the theoretical part of the course a bit long and found it difficult to concentrate at times, this is strongly linked to the distance learning put in place following the lockdown.”

“I would tend to say have fewer lectures, but they are very important in terms of understanding the concepts for what we do afterwards. Maybe a little more activities to do in class.”

“Make sure to include students more and to make the class more interactive.”

5. Conclusion

27The results are encouraging concerning student engagement in the project and a positive impact on learning outcomes. Students were generally favourable to the approach adopted. The analysis of authentic promotional materials based on discourse analysis techniques and tools was considered by students as useful for developing their writing skills and creativity and this was borne out in their productions. Most importantly, it was deemed to provide useful skills for the workplace, which was one of our main goals at the outset. While the project itself encouraged students to be actors in their learning, the lack of interactivity with the tools themselves was seen as a negative point. The size of the corpus used was another limitation. This has led me to make some adjustments moving forward. The next step is to get learners to interact more directly with the corpora by creating their own corpus and using the tools that were demonstrated this year. This would be more suited to a face-to-face learning situation to handle any difficulties students might have in installing and using the software, particularly IRaMuTeQ. Together with the students, I also need to build the corpus further to make sure it includes content from a range of companies competing in the boating sector to enable students to compare promotional discourse across different companies. Moving forward, I believe these modifications will greatly enhance the course.