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Creating Academic Text: The Use of Lexical Syntagms by L2 Undergraduate Students of English

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Working with Text and Around Text in Foreign Language Environments

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Abstract

The following chapter seeks to explore Polish undergraduate students’ ability to attend to the task of constructing academic text. Choosing lexical syntagms as a point of departure, five types of word combination typical of the academic genre were selected to gauge students’ performance and compare it with that of expert native-speaker writers. Two small corpora were compiled in order to delve into similarities and differences in the use of academic lexical syntagms. We hypothesize that differences exist in the distribution and implementation of those combinations. The chapter begins with a brief outline of different approaches to phraseology in order to put the study in the broader context of idiomaticity. We then propose a typology of academic syntagms. The analytical core of the chapter utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to arrive at conclusive results.

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Steinbrich, P. (2016). Creating Academic Text: The Use of Lexical Syntagms by L2 Undergraduate Students of English. In: Chodkiewicz, H., Steinbrich, P., Krzemińska-Adamek, M. (eds) Working with Text and Around Text in Foreign Language Environments. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33272-7_8

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