Academic Word Lists in English and Romanian: a corpus-based contrastive analysis

Abstract

Academic Word Lists in English and Romanian: a corpus-based contrastive analysis) For multiple reasons, there is a lack of studies on Academic Writing in Romanian languagefew scholars deal with an overview of writing practices in Romanian HEIs, even fewer deal with the vocabulary or writing principles specific to certain disciplines. In this context, the Romanian "scientific production" is extremely varied at the discursive level, both because of the lack of standardised curriculum concerning Academic Writing and because of the heterogeneity of writing rules and publication conditions imposed by Romanian journals. The aim of this study is to analyse the relevance of Academic Word Lists for Romanian academic writing, bringing into discussion examples and methodologies from the English language sphere, where tools such as the one proposed by Avery Coxhead in the late 1990s have proven their effectiveness. The applied dimension of this paper is based on the analysis of an expert, bilingual corpus of scientific articles -EXPREScompiled within the DACRE project (Discipline-specific expert academic writing in Romanian and English: corpus-based contrastive analysis models). The aim of the study is to propose and exemplify the possibility of constructing such a glossary based on writing practices, by examining some of the results provided by corpus linguistics tools such as N-Grams or concordance lines.