DIY Needs Analysis and Specific Text Types: Using The Prime Machine to Explore Vocabulary in Readymade and Homemade English Corpora

Abstract

Corpus tools offer various methods that can be harnessed in vocabulary needs analysis. This chapter presents an introduction to several methods, providing suggestions on how they can be used specifically for this purpose and identifying steps involved in various well-known corpus tools. It then considers the potential of hands-on corpus work with students (known as Data-Driven Learning), along with some common challenges. Finally, it introduces a free and user-friendly English corpus tool, The Prime Machine, and takes examples from two undergraduate corpus assignments to show how language learners can successfully start to explore their own vocabulary needs in readymade corpora and in collections of texts of specific varieties they have gathered themselves. It is demonstrated that these corpus-driven techniques can help language learners engage in some needs analyses of their own.