Learning Spanish Wine Language through Lexical Chunks

Abstract

This paper provides a window on the role of creating a self-study language course for wine-growers from a beginners' level, with the aim of gaining insights into the use of lexical chunks in language for specific purposes (LSP) teaching and learning. It focuses on describing the practical aspects, such as material design or chunk parsing, of a specific project named VinoLingua. But it also aims at going beyond our individual practice to set out the sources and grounds of the VinoLingua scientific framework and to examine the ideas about language and learning on which our approach is based: the importance of working with real language corpora and the use of standardised expressions and off-the-peg chunks of varying degrees of complexity for LSP teaching and learning. It may, therefore, serve as a model for any basic language courses designed for other professional groups.