Building Vocabulary Acquisition Skills in English Academic Writing with the aid of Corpus Linguistics: the UCS Writing Center Initiative

Abstract

Acquisition of academic vocabulary is paramount to students’ success in academic life, as well as for the process of writing publishable papers in English so that research can be shared more broadly (NAGY; TOWNSEND 2012; PAQUOT, 2014). While in countries such as The U.S. and England the practice of offering Writing Centers for academic writing thrives, the initiative is still quite shy in Brazil (CONS 2020), though some Writing Centers around the country have recently started to operate. The aim of this paper is to report how the training activities of the Writing Center at University of Caxias do Sul – UCS Writing Center - use the Corpus Linguistics approach (BERBER-SARDINHA 2004) to enhance acquisition of academic vocabulary, therefore providing better academic writing skills to professors and students of the institution and the community it targets. The article contextualizes the Writing Center within the University and presents a series of activities which were designed based on research of Corpus Linguistics’ application to the teaching and learning of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The activities provide specific instances of how Corpus Linguistics resources can be an invaluable asset for the improvement of vocabulary in academic writing in English, being especially useful for researchers who wish to upgrade the quality of the language used in their international publications.