Edinburgh Napier University

  In our presentation for the IATEFL ESP-SIG in Athens our intention was to create ‘wobble’ and genuine dialogue around the issue of the importance of ‘context’ in relation to corpus linguistics. We believe we failed to achieve this, as illustrated by the questions asked at the end of the presentation. Subsequently, in this paper we approach the creation of dialogue differently. We first detail our backgrounds as lecturers and researchers in academic support, and our research into the ‘English’ students need to succeed. We also detail the questions we were asked at the end of the presentation and why we believe these illustrate our failure to create dialogue. Following this introduction, we outline theories underpinning our ideas of viewing language as an individual subjectivist entity and the importance of this to how we view context in language meaning. We argue for the importance of considering what ‘context’ is and how we must strive to achieve ‘context’, in particular when using corpus based techniques. We then detail our method and present and discuss our key findings. Throughout, we focus on the generation of questions we believe will create genuine dialogue around the issue of ‘context’ in relation to language and corpus-based techniques, and conclude by gathering these together and outlining why we feel these questions are of importance to ESP and EAP materials development and helping students with their studies.