English for event creation: a corpus-based approach to ESP

The paper aims at showing how university learners can benefit from a corpus-based approach to the study of English for Event Planning. MA students in Advertising, Multimedia Communication and Event Creation have been exposed to a specialised corpus of English for event description/presentation in order to learn the most frequent lexico-syntactic patterns to be used in event-presentations. Corpus-based Learning represents a new challenge for university teachers and learners as it requires special technical equipment and introductory lessons on the use and functions of corpus tools. Even so, results prove to be of a higher quality than those obtained through traditional text-books. The combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis enables university learners to use ESP more appropriately in authentic communication, thus becoming more competent users in the global market.