ROGER

Madalina Chitez presented the paper (co-authored with Claudia Doroholschi) “Towards a bilingual comparable corpus of academic writing texts: first steps in ROGER” at the international conference Languages for Specific Purposes in Higher Education – Current Trends, Approaches and Issues, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in November 2017.

The paper presented by Madalina Chitez at the conference Languages for Specific Purposes in Higher Education – Current Trends, Approaches and Issues, held in Brno, Czech Republic, between 9 and 10 November 2017, aimed at disseminating work-in progress results and news about the ROGER project:

More information about the conference

Abstract:

Genre-based corpus research has provided insight into the general rhetorical profiles, the structure and functions of genres in the disciplines.
The ROGER project aims at using a mixed approach in which genre-based research and corpus-based interlanguage analyses are combined. Including the students’ mother tongue in the contrastive analyses will open new paths of investigation. At the same time, looking at academic genres from the perspective of their closeness to international standards, i.e. academic writing in English, versus the mother-tongue rhetoric features, may lead to a clearer view of the challenges that Romanian students have to face when dealing with academic literacy in both their native language and English.
As a first stage in the project, an academic-genre survey will be designed, tested and then implemented at the national level. The results of the survey will be used for mapping academic genres written in English and Romanian at Romanian universities. The questionnaire will also serve as the basis for compilation of the ROGER corpus (corpus of ROmanian academic GEnRes), which will include academic text types written by the Romanian students in Romanian and English. In the end, the research results will be integrated into literacy-support teaching strategies.
In our paper, we will briefly present the new project, its theoretical background (e.g. academic genres in different academic contexts, corpus-based genre analysis) and reflect on use of surveys in the area of academic genres.

Impressions:

• A very interesting keynote talk on LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) and its intersection with ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAW (English Academic Writing) by David Tual from the University of Cambridge.
• A nice mix of teaching and research experts
• Positively surprised by the amount and quality of talks in the area of corpus linguistics (such as James Wilson’s, from the University of Leeds, UK: Building and Using Academic Corpora to Enhance Students’ Academic Writing Skills).