Classroom use of authentic texts used in everyday communication has not always been an inseparable part of foreign language teaching. According to Grigaliuniene (2013, p. 17), “the structures many current textbooks teach for certain functions are either never used or used infrequently while quite unexpected structures are the ones that actually occur”. Despite the awareness of the importance of authentic patterns of language use, students often learn structures (lexical or grammatical) which are rarely used in actual communication. Teaching authentic phrases is even more important in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) where learners' specific needs impact the design of a course (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). What is more, ESP students need to acquire vocabulary of a target profession. Thus, in this preliminary study, conducted using corpus linguistic methodology, an attempt is made to identify and explore the use and discourse functions of frequent and typical patterns of language use, i.e. keywords, recurrent clusters and multi-word terms (nominalizations), found in a custom-designed corpus of car reviews written in English. As shown by examples of student tasks, the results have pedagogical potential in that they can be used as a useful resource when designing or supplementing teaching materials for secondary-school ESP students (automotive technicians and car mechanics).1)