Scope and limits of corpus-based studies of the medical research article for teaching ESL student researchers: discussion and example

Medical research and knowledge is communicated among the discourse community of practitioners and researchers through spoken and written genres, including peer-reviewed research publications. Such publications are required reading for student researchers in medicine, who must learn to critically analyse and summarise this information while attending to the characteristics of this genre. English as a Second Language (ESL) students must learn to critically read such texts and manage the linguistic difficulties of medical language. With this audience in mind, corpus based applied linguistics has investigated the lexical and rhetorical specifics of the genre. These findings have contributed to our knowledge of the linguistic and rhetorical nature of texts of this genre, which can complement other instructional resources required in applied linguistic higher education contexts. In this paper, I describe the principles of genre-based writing pedagogy, the contribution of corpusbased studies to our understanding of the medical research genre, and I describe the construction of an LSP (language for specific purposes) corpus of medical research texts for analysis and teaching purposes.