This study aims to analyse the effects of a digitally enhanced teaching strategy in an ESP course. The intervention method consists of guided corpus linguistics exercises which are progressively introduced to improve the students’ academic writing. We collected data from various task-based corpus processing, consultation and analysis stages, each one having a different complexity level: compilation of a discipline-specific expert corpus, consultation of a native speaker English corpus and analyses of both types. The pre- and post-intervention results are quantitatively and qualitatively assessed, controlling for discipline specificity. The results of a corpus consultation satisfaction survey are also included in the analysis. We conclude that corpus consultations not only lead to the improvement of ESP students’ writing but also increasing student motivation. The recommendation is to first test the digital methods in ESP courses and calibrate them according to disciplinary settings.
Corpora are valuable technology-supported learning resources to be used
by autonomous language learners or during teacher-guided lessons. This study
explores the potential of corpus consultation approaches for the improvement
of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students’ academic writing skills. We
investigated the effects of three types of Data-Driven Learning (DDL)
activities in a sample group of 29 first-year and second-year students
majoring in Geography for Tourism at a Romanian university, consisting of
writing tasks supported by: a Learner Corpus (LC), a Native-Speaker Corpus
(NSC), and a Web-based Corpus (WBC). The research methodology involves the
combination of quantitative and qualitative data, extracted from pre- and
post-intervention corpus analyses, with the results of a
learner-satisfaction questionnaire. The findings indicate a significant
differentiation in the complexity of the lexico-grammatical features used by
learners in consequent intervention stages and a better integration of
L2-related academic writing strategies into their written productions. The
study yields first conclusions on the integration of computer-processed
language databases in DDL strategies for ESP learners in the Romanian
university context.
Learner corpora of written texts from academic writing assignments
provide a practical resource for students, particularly in fostering
academic writing skills. One such corpus is the newly available ROGER
(Corpus of Romanian Academic Genres), a bilingual comparable corpus
containing learner discipline-specific academic writing data in Romanian
native language (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2). This paper aims
to illustrate a series of academic writing teaching approaches supported by
the ROGER platform (launched in May 2022) to be applied by tutors in an
academic writing classroom setting. The results are structured according to
Ädel’s (2010) methodological model for fostering rhetorical functions and
specific phraseology in academic writing, coupled with addressing
metadiscourse markers to better assist in the enhancement of students’
academic writing skills at the university undergraduate level.
This paper analyses the construction of two superheroines, one from the 1990s (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and one from the 2010s (Jessica Jones). I contend that popular feminism has changed between the 1990s and the present and that this is evident in the representation of televised superheroines. While in the 1990s superheroines were more conformist, today they are more transparent in their feminist intentions. I suggest that this is due to contemporary cultural trends in the United States.
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