Representativeness and significance factors in ESP texts

The development of communicative approaches and strategies in specialized discourse has led to revising notions of representative and significant language . Particularly in the work with academic genres, in science and technology (EST) settings such as our own institution, the need for determining these factors is ever growing. The application of empirical resources such as specific language corpora, in fact, becomes convenient. In this paper, the aim is to specify the type of corpus linguistic representativeness and significance sought in the case of teaching English to our groups of Computer Science students. In that scope, we present data and samples on which to base our suggestions and claims regarding the exploitation of textual material.