Abstract: ESP teaching in China is misled by "knowledge-orientation" and classes are normally delivered based on teachers-personal experience. If ESP teachers can make a need analysis for the students and choose authentic materials to establish an ESP corpus, the problems can be solved. By establishing an aeronautical English corpus, the paper explores the application of corpora in ESP teaching. Based on this corpus, a quantitative analysis of the frequency of "fail" and "failure" is made to prove the hypothesis that aeronautical English tends to use more verb nominalization structures. The case study indicates that small corpus is effective in helping students acquire the characteristics of aeronautical English and make them sensitive to language phenomenon.