Keep out of reach of children! Introducing the Corpus of Product Information (CoPI) and its potential for corpus-based genre teaching

Author： Puga Karin Gtz Sandra

Publisher： Edinburgh University Press

E-ISSN： 1755-1676|12|3|393-423

ISSN： 1755-1676

Source： Corpora, Vol.12, Iss.3, 2017-11, pp. : 393-423

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the language-pedagogic potential of the Corpus of Product Information (CoPI). The corpus is XML-annotated and contains about 100,000 words of product descriptions of health products, cleaning supplies and products for beauty and personal care, divided into three textual moves: (1) overview, (2) directions and (3) warnings. First, we describe the data collection, corpus design and annotation scheme of the corpus, and then we present the findings of an analysis of CoPI's most frequent words, clusters and its typetoken ratio. Finally, we show its potential for language-pedagogic purposes and suggest how the CoPI analyses can be used for paper- and computer-based DDL activities that foster corpus-based genre teaching in the advanced EFL classroom. We conclude this paper by summarising the outcomes of a first case study we conducted to test these activities with advanced learners of English.