ASSESSING LEARNERS’ ACADEMIC PHRASEOLOGY IN THE DIGITAL AGE: A CORPUS-INFORMED APPROACH TO ESP TEXTS

Authors

  • Andreea Dinca CODHUS – Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities Faculty of Letters, History and Theology West University of Timisoara, Romania
  • Madalina Chitez CODHUS – Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities Faculty of Letters, History and Theology West University of Timisoara, Romania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22190/JTESAP2101071D

Abstract

In the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), as in any other type of interlanguage, phraseology contributes significantly to successful academic writing (Biber and Barbieri 2007). For particular learner varieties, such as Romanian English, few studies have examined formulaic sequences (Hyland 2008), mainly focusing on lexico-grammatical patterns (Chitez 2012, 2014).  The proposed paper investigates the use of phraseology in Romanian students’ academic papers, written during their ESP courses, by adopting a double contrastive perspective: first, we contrast texts produced in two different disciplines (Literature Studies and Information Technology), and, second, we compare the academic phraseology in learner language with native speaker phraseology. For the analysis, we have compiled two corpora (ESP-LIT and ESP-IT), each consisting of 40 texts representing a discipline specific didactic genre, e.g. essay. As reference, we used the Academic Phrasebank (Davis and Morley 2018). The aim is to find out whether the use of academic formulaic expressions differs according to the discipline and the extent to which students integrate expert academic phrases into their writing. The methodology can be replicated for different language learning settings.

Author Biographies

  • Andreea Dinca, CODHUS – Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities Faculty of Letters, History and Theology West University of Timisoara, Romania

    Andreea Dinca is a doctoral researcher and member of the CODHUS (Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities) research centre, within the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, at the West University of Timisoara in Romania. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in applied corpus linguistics at the same university and her research concerns phraseology in Romanian Learner English writing in an academic setting. Her wider research interests include Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpus Research, Phraseology, Academic Writing, Computer-Assisted Language Learning.

  • Madalina Chitez, CODHUS – Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities Faculty of Letters, History and Theology West University of Timisoara, Romania

    After receiving her doctoral degree in English Philology, specialisation corpus linguistics, from Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2011, Madalina Chitez took a position as a researcher at the Department of Applied Linguistics of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland, where she worked for seven years. Since June 2017, she has been working as a senior researcher and coordinator of applied corpus linguistics projects (focus areas: academic writing, computer-assisted language learning, digital humanities) at the West University of Timisoara, Romania. Her main current project is ROGER (2017-2022), in the frame of which an interactive platform allowing searches within a bilingual Romanian-English comparative corpus of academic genres is being built.  Since October 2019, she is the executive president of the CODHUS research centre (Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities), within the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, which has a strong applicative character, aiming at offering practical digitally supported solutions for research, teaching, learning or large-scale use to as many beneficiaries as possible.  

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Published

2021-03-02

Issue

Vol. 9, No 1, 2021

Section

ESP Conference 2020