Abstract
This chapter focuses on the application of a corpus of specialized genres to the teaching of legal and business English for students of translation at a graduate level. It includes a number of practical learning activities aimed to improve their reading and writing skills, which proved to be the most relevant skills for the acquisition of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) after analysing the needs of the students. The issues dealt with in these activities include collocations, lexis, macrostructure, suffixed prepositions and expressions of obligation, permission and prohibition. The multilingual corpus of specialized professional full-text documents we work with has been developed by the GENTT (Textual Genres for Translation) Research Group and provides teachers and learners of professional languages with text models and patterns to be used as conceptual, textual, linguistic and terminological reference. The GENTT corpus is a collaborative web 2.0 environment that enables teachers and students to search, feed, download and manage the documents contained in the corpus by means of a user-friendly online interface, making it an effective teaching-learning Internet tool in the area of LSP.
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Learning to identify modals in business agreements; Understanding and using suffixed prepositions; Familiarizing with the macrostructure of commercial agreements; Becoming familiar with the lexis of business correspondence; and Identifying typical business correspondence collocations.
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Albi, A.B., Vidal, N.J., López, P.O., Conde, T. (2014). A Genre-Based Approach to the Teaching of Legal and Business English: The GENTT Specialized Corpus in the LSP Classroom. In: Bárcena, E., Read, T., Arús, J. (eds) Languages for Specific Purposes in the Digital Era. Educational Linguistics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02222-2_9
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