ROGER

On 13-16 July 2021, the ROGER team presented a paper at the Corpus Linguistics International Conference (CL2021) co-hosted by the University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland, with online participation.

More information about the conference here.

Impressions here (Twitter)

Andreea Dinca, Dr. Loredana Bercuci, Dr. Madalina Chitez and Kristian Miok presented the paper Capturing phraseological profiles in ESP writing: a corpus-driven contrastive study of multiword units in argumentative essays

Abstract: Previous studies investigating phraseology in English L2 writing inform that learner production is prone to mother tongue transfer (Granger, 2017). This leads to interlanguage errors and recurrent use of particular multiword units, suggesting that pedagogical intervention should be adapted “to the attested needs of particular learner populations” (ibid., p. 14). Our study sets out to gain further understanding of the phraseological profile (Nam & Park, 2020) in the argumentative writing produced by ESP learners from various L1 backgrounds. The objectives of the study are: (1) test and present a corpus-driven methodology for the extraction of the phraseological profile, defined as a set of multiword units there are specific to a particular ESP writing group, using data representative of the Romanian ESP writing; (2) to establish the degree to which the types and functions of multiword units vary across different mother tongue learner populations. For the analysis of the academic phraseology used by the Romanian ESP students, we used data from the freshly compiled Romanian Genre Corpus / ROGER (Bercuci & Chitez, 2019, p. 737), an academic genre (comparable) bilingual corpus that contains university writing in the mother tongue (Romanian L1) and English (L2) in several disciplines. Our methodology involves contrasting the most frequent 3 and 4-word lexical bundles in a sub-set of ROGER containing argumentative writing by undergraduate ESP students with two sub-corpora from the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. 2009), representing different L2 population groups, i.e. Romance (ICLE-FR) and Germanic (ICLE-GE). We argue that the present study will shed new light on the phraseology used by the Romanian ESP novice writers, to be included in further corpus-driven contrastive studies, while also proving useful in expanding our understanding of mother tongue influence on foreign language production.

References

Bercuci, L, & Chitez. M. (2019). A corpus analysis of argumentative structures in ESP writing. International Online Journal of Education and Teaching (IOJET), 6(4), 733-747.

Granger, S. (2017). Academic phraseology. A key ingredient in successful L2 academic literacy. Oslo Studies in Language, 9(3), 9-27.

Granger, S., Dagneaux, E., Meunier, F., & Paquot, M. (2009). The International Corpus of Learner English. Handbook and CD-ROM. Version2. Presses universitaires de Louvain.

Nam, D. and Park, K. (2020). I will write about: Investigating multiword expressions in prospective students’ argumentative writing. PLoS ONE, 15(12): e0242843. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242843

Presentation excerpts