Discovering patterns in the discourse of foreign relations. Corpus analysis in an ESP course for International Relations students

Introducing Corpus Linguistics in an ESP course for students of International Relations might seem pointless at a first glance. In such contexts, ‘the top priority is to enable students to read in English for their other courses and in view of their future professional needs' (Brodine 2001:138). Therefore, they are likely to find corpus work a useless complication in their study of the English language.Our experiment, in contrast, is aimed at enhancing the students' awareness both of the specific lexicogrammatical and syntactic features that characterise the discourse of foreign relations and of the links existing – in texts belonging to that genre – between discourse strategies and global as well as local socio-political issues. The present paper thus illustrates work carried out during a 15-hour seminar on Corpus Linguistics in the framework of an ESP course taken by students of the Laurea Magistrale in International Relations at the University of Naples “Federico II”. The course was divided into three main parts: a theoretical introduction to using Corpus Linguistics in the study of political discourse; a practical introduction to using WordSmith Tools with the assistance of the teacher, in order to analyse texts already encountered by the students during the ESP course; a final research produced by the students as the outcome of corpus analysis carried out by them working in autonomous groups on a small specialized corpus assembled by themselves collecting official documents about terrorism produced both by the United Nations and the White House.The experiment yielded interesting results, as the students enjoyed taking on the role of linguistic researcher (Gavioli 2001) and, in a very short time, acquired skills that will help them in their future understanding of the mechanisms underlying the discourse of international relations.