An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies

In the past few years, several corpus-based studies have been carried out which either explicitly in some cases, but more subtly in others, draw on aspects of genre theory for their analyses. The purpose of this paper is to review those corpus studies which specifically draw on either the English for Specific Purposes (following the Swales tradition of genre) or the New Rhetoric approaches to genre. Through a review of such studies, it will be shown that the integration of both corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP can, to some extent, counteract some of the major criticisms that have been leveled against corpus linguistic analyses, namely that such analyses apply bottom-up rather than top-down methodologies and that they do not consider the socio-cultural context as they deal with decontextualized corpus data.