Nowadays, scientific writers are required not only a thorough knowledge of their subject field, but also a sound command of English as a lingua franca. In this paper, the lexical errors produced in scientific texts written in English by non-native researchers are identified to propose a classification of the categories they contain. This study will enable researchers to improve their writing and facilitate smoother communication among international writers. In addition, establishing the causes of these errors may enable the recurrent pattern to be identified and the necessary guidelines for their correction to be drawn up. These data may be able to illuminate the processes followed by non-native speakers of English when learning new words, and thereby facilitate the avoidance of errors and the identification of the mechanisms which can permit the correct production of the specialised lexicon.KEYWORDS: error analysis; error classification; second language acquisition; scientific writing. RESUMENEn la actualidad, los escritores científicos han de ser no sólo conocedores de sus areas específicas de conocimiento, sino también de la lengua inglesa, que se utiliza como lengua franca. En este artículo, se han identificado los errores léxicos que se producen en los textos científicos escritos en inglés por investigadores no nativos para proponer una clasificación de sus categorías. Este estudio permitirá a los investigadores mejorar su escritura y facilitará una mayor comunicación entre los escritores internacionales. Adicionalmente, el establecer las causas de estos errores podría permitir identificar los patrones recurrentes y proponer una serie de medidas para corregirlos. Estos datos podrían mostrar los procesos que han seguido los escritores no nativos de la lengua inglesa cuando aprenden nuevas palabras y, por lo tanto, facilitar no cometer errores e identificar los mecanismos que pueden permitir una correcta producción de un léxico especializado.PALABRAS CLAVE: análisis de errores; clasificación de errores; adquisición de una segunda lengua; escritura científica.

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As technology increasingly shapes the world we live in, communication is affected by these changes. We can no longer talk about one mode for transmitting a message, since multimodality is common, and interaction between several channels to make communication effective is constant. The work presented here analyses from a multimodal point of view the creation of meaning by means of the interaction between images and texts in English as a foreign language by University students. The analysis uses the Descriptive framework of multimodality to study the role of images in the creation of meaning. Then, it analyses how students intermingle texts and images to communicate. The results show that different strategies are used for the communication of unlike types of concepts, and a greater relying on images as concepts increase in abstraction.

Many researchers emphasize the importance of corpora in the design of Language-for-Specific-Purposes courses in higher education. However, identifying those lexical units which belong to a given specific domain is often a complex task for language teachers, where simple introspection or concordance analysis does not really become effective. The goal of this paper is to describe DEXTER, an open-access platform for data mining and terminology management, whose aim is not only the search, retrieval, exploration and analysis of texts in domain-specific corpora but also the automatic extraction of specialized words from the domain.

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