The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies
-
JoAnne Neff
Abstract
Since Erasmus exchanges have fostered student mobility in the European Union, various features of argumentation skills for Academic English (AE) have become central elements of university curricula. This chapter presents an analysis of a small corpus of texts written in an academic writing (AW) class by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Spanish university students at B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR). The small corpus data is contrasted with the Spanish sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (SPICLE) regarding the use of certain devices for intertextuality and evaluation. The study shows that students who have been given very definite CEFR guidelines regarding the use of specific academic features are able to improve their writing, even though there remain certain types of errors in their overall lexico-grammatical production.
Abstract
Since Erasmus exchanges have fostered student mobility in the European Union, various features of argumentation skills for Academic English (AE) have become central elements of university curricula. This chapter presents an analysis of a small corpus of texts written in an academic writing (AW) class by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Spanish university students at B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR). The small corpus data is contrasted with the Spanish sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (SPICLE) regarding the use of certain devices for intertextuality and evaluation. The study shows that students who have been given very definite CEFR guidelines regarding the use of specific academic features are able to improve their writing, even though there remain certain types of errors in their overall lexico-grammatical production.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements ix
- List of contributors xi
- Preface xiii
- Putting corpora to good uses 1
- Frequency, corpora and language learning 7
- Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 33
- The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 63
- Revisiting apprentice texts 85
- Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora 109
- Data mining with learner corpora 127
- Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? 155
- Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs 173
- Corpora and the new Englishes 209
- Towards a new generation of corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning 237
- Automating the creation of dictionaries 257
- addendumSelect list of publications by Sylviane Granger 283
- Subject index 289
- Name index 293
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements ix
- List of contributors xi
- Preface xiii
- Putting corpora to good uses 1
- Frequency, corpora and language learning 7
- Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 33
- The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 63
- Revisiting apprentice texts 85
- Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora 109
- Data mining with learner corpora 127
- Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? 155
- Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs 173
- Corpora and the new Englishes 209
- Towards a new generation of corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning 237
- Automating the creation of dictionaries 257
- addendumSelect list of publications by Sylviane Granger 283
- Subject index 289
- Name index 293
