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Corpus Linguistics Meets Academic Writing: Examples of Applications in the Romanian EFL Context

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University Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 29))

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Abstract

Corpus-based academic writing studies have been increasingly used to verify hypotheses regarding processes of university writing and learning. In the Romanian context, research in the areas of academic writing and corpus linguistics has been relatively scarce. Academic writing in Romanian is not explicitly taught, whereas academic writing in English is part of the curricula of a major or minor in English. The Romanian corpus linguistics field is mainly represented by the Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence Institute (RACAI) whose activity consists of the creation of corpora to support natural language processing (NPL) investigations. There are only few learner and specialized corpora available for research. In the present chapter, the Romanian Corpus of Learner English (RoCLE) is used in order to exemplify the manner in which corpora can be used in academic writing classes. Three topics have been selected for exemplification: contrastive linguistics, academic phraseology, and move analysis. For each topic, a brief description of the theoretical background with relevance for the Romanian context is given, followed by examples of corpus-based analyses extracted from RoCLE. Based on the same examples, pedagogical recommendations indicate possible directions of corpus use in teaching academic writing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Open School for Academic Self-improvement. Research, Academic Writing and Career Management PN-II-PCCA-2011-3.1-0682 212/2.07.2012 grant funded by UEFISCDI—www.uefiscdi.gov.ro

  2. 2.

    Possible sources for analyzing academic phraseology: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, West University of Timișoara, Timișoara, Timiș, Romania

    Mădălina Chitez

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  1. Mădălina Chitez
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, West University of Timisoara, Timișoara, Timiș, Romania

    Mădălina Chitez

  2. Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, West University of Timișoara, Timișoara, Timiș, Romania

    Claudia Ioana Doroholschi

  3. Department of Applied Linguistics, Language Competence Centre, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland

    Otto Kruse

  4. Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Łodz, Łódź, Poland

    Łukasz Salski

  5. Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, Department of Romanian Studies, West University of Timișoara, Timișoara, Timiș, Romania

    Dumitru Tucan

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Chitez, M. (2018). Corpus Linguistics Meets Academic Writing: Examples of Applications in the Romanian EFL Context. In: Chitez, M., Doroholschi, C., Kruse, O., Salski, Ł., Tucan, D. (eds) University Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation. Multilingual Education, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95198-0_10

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