Speaker
Description
Mastering academic language remains a central challenge across university disciplines, as learners are expected to handle increasingly complex topics, genres, and stance-driven patterns, often with higher stakes for those working in an additional language. In response, corpus linguistics has reshaped lexicography (Rees, 2021) by evidencing language use not only as single lexical units, e.g., academic wordlists (Coxhead, 2016), but also as recurrent phraseological combinations, where corpus methods have been especially transformative (Paquot, 2015). Projects such as the Louvain EAP Dictionary (LEAP) demonstrate that online, needs-driven academic writing aids can now be structured around discipline-specific phraseological evidence (Granger & Paquot, 2015).
Despite growing interest in discipline-sensitive EAP resources (Rees, 2021; Ang & Tan, 2018), Education remains completely unexplored as a target domain for discipline-specific EAP lexicography. Education was not formally recognised as an academic discipline within universities until the twentieth century (Wyse, 2020), and its lexicon is distinctive: high-stakes yet conceptually diffuse, multidisciplinary, institutionally embedded, and strongly value-laden, with terminology that is often contested, relabelled, and unevenly stabilised across subfields. The practical need is substantial: beyond researchers and postgraduate students writing about pedagogy in English as an additional language, the global English-language teaching industry produces a large population of trainee teachers (e.g., CELTA, TESOL programmes) who must master pedagogical terminology in English. Against the United Nations SDG 4 (Quality Education), accessible and precise pedagogical language becomes more acute still, particularly in multilingual academic communities (Adipat & Chotikapanich, 2022).
Methodologically, the poster presents a needs-driven corpus design (Nesi, 2015; Flowerdew, 2013) in which the target domain was not imposed from a pre-existing taxonomy but derived empirically from the community itself. Semi-structured interviews with twelve members of the Pedagogy in Education Studies (PES) community of practice were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021), yielding fifteen inductive thematic clusters. These were consolidated into five macro-themes, pedagogy and assessment; inclusion and diversity; teachers; curriculum and technology; and PES as discipline, which served as the topical architecture of the corpus and as seed-term generators for web-based corpus construction via BootCat (Baroni & Bernardini, 2004). The resulting PES corpus was then evaluated retrospectively against Egbert, Biber and Gray’s (2022) representativeness framework, following Kemp’s (2024) concept of a Representativeness Argument: a structured post-hoc validation addressing both target-domain coverage and linguistic stability (Gray, Egbert & Biber, 2017). The poster visualises this full workflow, from community needs analysis through corpus construction to domain evaluation and the resulting pathway for extracting a pedagogy-centred lexicon that captures both high-frequency academic vocabulary and the phraseology through which pedagogical knowledge is routinely articulated by PES scholars.
Finally, the study is motivated by a commitment to strengthening Education’s standing as an academic discipline: scholars who are driven by an ethical purpose to make a difference in the lives of learners and society constitute, in Furlong’s (2013) terms, a hugely important force in defining the field. Lexicographic resources that clarify pedagogy’s core lexis and phraseology can function as enabling infrastructure for this purpose, supporting educational participation and knowledge exchange beyond institutionalised borders (Liguori et al., 2023). The poster will also address how the impact of such a dictionary might best be measured, including uptake metrics, user studies, and integration with existing EAP writing tools.