Corpus-supported academic writing: how can technology help?

Abstract

Phraseology has long been used in L2 teaching of academic writing, and corpus linguistics has played a major role in the compilation and assessment of academic phrases. However, there are only a few interactive academic writing tools in which corpus methodology is implemented in a real-time design to support formulation processes. In this paper, we describe several corpus-related methods that we have developed and implemented as part of an interactive thesis-writing tool, Thesis Writer, designed and constructed jointly by the Language Competence Centre and the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. Thesis Writer (TW) hosts several linguisticsupport tools and is designed in its first pilot version to support thesis writing in economics with the help of two self-compiled corpora in English and German. Students can access the corpora directly via the IMS Open Corpus Workbench or via a pre-selected collection of central rhetorical elements through the phrase book. Several search options and tutorials have been tested and included into the TW platform: the corpus simple search tool, the corpus syntactic search tool, and the academic phrasebook. In the case of the latter, a new methodology led to the identification of lists of phrases distributed in research-cycle sections of the thesis.

Faculty and student representations of academic writing at Spanish universities / Las representaciones de profesores y estudiantes sobre la escritura académica en las universidades españolas

“…European writing survey (EUWRIT) We used the Spanish version of the European Writing Survey (Encuesta Europea sobre la Escritura Académica; EEEA) for both faculty and students (Chitez et al, 2015;Kruse, 2013;). An early version of the survey was translated 3 and piloted in a previous study (Castelló, Mateos et al, 2012).…”

“…In addition to the first dimension, which gathers the personal information of the participants (age, gender, years of study/teaching, kind of studies/degree, university and native language), the dimensions and scales were designed with the intention of analysing the variables involved in writing practices (scales 2-6) and those related to values, beliefs and conceptions about the composition process and written texts (scale 5open-ended questionsand scale 7). The inclusion of these two major groups of variables is based on previous studies which confirm their influence when describing different written academic cultures Chitez et al, 2015;Delcambre & Donahue, 2012;Kruse, 2013). Regarding practices, the items refer to aspects related to the amount of time spent writing, the amount and frequency of writing, instructions on both planning and writing or revising, and kind of feedback and the most frequent kinds of genres that students write.…”

“…Its results included the development of the European Writing Survey (EUWRIT), which has two versions, one for students and the other for faculty. It is currently available in eight languages, including Spanish, Catalan and Basque, and it was used as the main data-gathering source in the articles in this issue (Chitez, Kruse, & Castelló, 2015;Kruse, 2013;.…”

Technology and strategy use in academic writing

“…In response to these expectations and challenges, researchers take some steps to facilitate the publication process and decrease the likelihood of rejection due to content, organisation, style and language-related issues. The most widely taken actions to improve text quality include but are not limited to using spell-check and grammar check tools (cavaleri & Dianati, 2016;Johnson, 2010), employing editing and proofreading strategies, getting feedback, taking regular breaks from writing, using writing models (Hyland, 2016b;Johnson, 2010;murray & moore, 2006) and using dictionaries or thesauri and corpus tools (chitez et al, 2015;goh & Lepage, 2019;Wischgoll, 2017).…”

Exploring intentional use of a technological proxy, Turnitin, to enhance student academic literacy practices

“…In education, the use of online proxies is booming, and this is particularly evident with the array of digital technologies currently available that carry out some key components of academic writing on behalf of the learner (Chitez, Rapp, & Kruse, 2015). For example, technological proxies have taken over some of the handson work associated with searching for relevant scholarly sources such as journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and patents (e.g., Google Scholar and ERIC).…”