Assessing learners’ academic phraseology in the digital age: A corpus-informed approach to esp texts

Abstract

In the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), as in any other type of interlanguage, phraseology contributes significantly to successful academic writing (Biber and Barbieri 2007). For particular learner varieties, such as Romanian English, few studies have examined formulaic sequences (Hyland 2008), mainly focusing on lexico-grammatical patterns (Chitez 2012, 2014). The proposed paper investigates the use of phraseology in Romanian students’ academic papers, written during their ESP courses, by adopting a double contrastive perspective: first, we contrast texts produced in two different disciplines (Literature Studies and Information Technology), and second, we compare academic phraseology in learner language with native speaker phraseology. For the analysis we have compiled two corpora (ESP-LIT and ESP-IT), each consisting of 40 texts representing a discipline specific didactic genre-essay. For reference we used the Academic Phrasebank (Davis and Morley 2018). The aim is to find out whether the use of academic formulaic expressions differs according to the discipline and the extent to which students integrate expert academic phrases into their writing. The methodology can be replicated for different language learning settings.