Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing: From Extraction to Analysis

Description

Academic vocabulary is in fashion, as witnessed by the increasing number of books published on the topic. In the first part of this book, Magali Paquot scrutinizes the concept of 'academic vocabulary' and proposes a corpus-driven procedure based on the criteria of keyness, range and evenness of distribution to select academic words that could be part of a common-core academic vocabulary syllabus. In the second part, the author offers a thorough analysis of academic vocabulary in the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and describes the factors that account for learners' difficulties in academic writing. She then focuses on the role of corpora, and more particularly, learner corpora, in EAP material design. It is the first monograph in which Granger's (1996) Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis is used to compare 10 ICLE learner sub-corpora, in order to distinguish between linguistic features that are shared by learners from a wide range of mother tongue backgrounds and unique features that may be transfer-related.

Magali Paquot is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium

"One of the most controversial issues in EAP curriculum development is the question of whether the focus of instruction should be geared toward general academic instruction or toward discipline-specific features. The work of Magali Paquot shows that there exists a culture of academic literacy signalled by a range of non-technical vocabulary which can be used by undergraduate students in diverse disciplines, particularly those words or phrases for marking major academic functions, such as defining, exemplifying, classifying, and reporting the viewpoints of other scholars. This book holds important implications for teachers of academic writing to all novice writers, both native and non-native. The findings the author has presented should be incorporated into materials development for undergraduate teaching." -- Joanne Neff van Aertselaer, Centro Superior de Idiomas Modernos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain The book is well organized... is definitely a reference and a source of ideas for teaching EFL as well as for designing teaching materials. -- The International Journal of Multicultural Education ... this book effectively addresses a range of relevant issues in investigating academic vocabulary in learner writing. The book will appeal to researchers, scholars and graduate students who are interested in conducting research studies in this field. The volume could also be used in graduate level classes, especially doctoral seminars, on discourse studies and corpus linguistics. -- Discourse Studies 13 (6)