ROGER

On 20-22 May 2021, the ROGER team presented a paper at the L2W Seminar (2021):  Advancing research in L2 writing and WCF appropriation in pen and paper and digital environments:  controlled and classroom-based studies at the University of Murcia in Murcia, Spain, with online participation 

More information about the seminar here.

Andreea Dinca and Dr. Madalina Chitez presented the paper Are phraseological teddy bears discipline-specific? A corpus analysis of academic phraseology used by Romanian learners of English

Abstract: Studies investigating the academic writing produced by learners of English suggest that non-native speakers use a limited number of recurrent word combinations (Ädel and Erman, 2012). At the same time, learners exhibit a tendency to over-rely on certain phraseological expressions that they feel confident to use, i.e. “phraseological teddy bears”, (Hasselgård, 2019). Such linguistic behavior could impact the quality of the texts written by L2 novice writers, since mastering the recurrent phraseological units typical of a “specific academic register and discipline” is fundamental (Ädel and Erman, 2012, p. 81). Additionally, previous research informs that lexical bundles vary significantly across disciplines (Hyland, 2008). Thus, the aim of the present study is to assess whether and how “phraseological teddy bears” differ across disciplines. We verify our hypotheses by analysing a corpus of English L2 texts written by the Romanian students. Our method involves the comparison of the most frequent 3 and 4-word lexical bundles in two different disciplines (Computer Science and Literary Studies) from two corpora that contain university student writing in English, namely the new Romanian Genre Corpus / ROGER (Bercuci & Chitez, 2019, p. 737) and the native-speaker academic writing corpus BAWE (Gardner and Nesi, 2013). We propose a double contrastive approach: first, we contrast the results from the two disciplines, Computer Science and Literary Studies, representing sub-sets of ROGER and second, the most frequent lexical bundles produced by learners are compared with the native speaker phrases extracted from the corresponding BAWE disciplinary sub-sets (e.g. Computer Science and English). We argue that this type of analysis can prove useful for identifying the restricted repertoire of L2 writers as opposed to native novice writers and it can be the starting point of a research-informed pedagogic intervention in L2 writing. 

References

Ädel, A. & B. Erman. 2012. Recurrent word combinations in academic writing by native speakers and non-native speakers of English: A lexical bundles approach. English for Specific Purposes, 31(2), 81-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2011.08.004

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.

Gardner, S. & Nesi, H. (2013) A classification of genre families in university student writing. Applied Linguistics, 34 (1), 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams024

Hasselgård, H. (2019). Phraseological teddy bears. In M. Mahlberg and V. Wiegand (Eds), Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture. (pp. 339-362). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes, 27 (1), 4-21. doi: 10.1016/j.esp.2007.06.0017.

Presentation excerpts