Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing

This volume showcases some of the latest research on academic writing by leading and up-and-coming corpus linguists. The studies included in the volume are based on a wide range of corpora spanning first and second language academic writing at different levels of writing expertise, containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines) and of different academic registers. Particularly novel aspects of the collection are the inclusion of research that combines rhetorical moves with multi-dimensional analysis, studies that cover both fixed and variable phraseological items (lexical bundles, phrase-frames, constructions), and work that is based on corpora of English as an academic lingua franca. Going beyond merely summarizing their findings, the authors also discuss what their research means for academic writing practice and pedagogical settings. The volume will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers who would like to expand their knowledge of how academic writing functions and what it looks like in a variety of contexts.

Douglas Biber, Northern Arizona University:
This volume encapsulates the breadth of corpus-based research approaches that can be applied to the study of academic writing, ranging from detailed studies of particular words and phrases to studies that compare multiple disciplines with respect to a wider set of linguistic features. Many of the papers are especially innovative in their integration of multiple research approaches, for example applying both rhetorical move analysis and multi-dimensional analysis to describe patterns of register variation across disciplines. For these reasons, the papers in this book will be of high interest to both students and established researchers interested in the distinctive linguistic characteristics of academic writing.