The Louvain EAP Dictionary (LEAD): A tailor-made web-based tool for non-native academic writers of English

Granger, Sylviane;Paquot, Magali
(2014) American Association of Corpus Linguistics — Location: Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA (26.September.2014)

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In our presentation we describe the Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary (LEAD), an integrated dictionary and corpus tool intended to help non-native speakers write academic texts in English (Granger & Paquot, 2010; Paquot, 2012). The LEAD contains a corpus-based description of c. 1200 academic words and phrases (with particular focus on their phraseology: collocations and lexical bundles) and highlights the main difficulties they pose to non-native writers as attested in a large corpus of learner texts. One particularly original feature of the dictionary is its customisability: the content is automatically adapted to users’ needs in terms of discipline and mother tongue background. Another key feature is that the LEAD can be used as both a semasiological dictionary (from lexeme to meaning) and an onomasiological dictionary (from meaning/concept to lexeme) via a list of typical rhetorical or organisational functions in academic discourse (Pecman 2008). It is also a semi-bilingual dictionary (Laufer & Levitzky-Aviad 2006): users who have selected a particular mother tongue background can search lexical entries via their translations into that language. With the advent of electronic dictionaries, corpus data are making their way into the dictionary via new components such as example banks or corpus-query systems. Unlike most online dictionaries, however, the LEAD innovates by giving access to discipline-specific corpora rather than generic corpora. Collocations and lexical bundles are also illustrated with examples automatically extracted from discipline-specific texts, thus allowing users to visualise senses in a context close to their own working environment (Williams, 2003). The dictionary therefore caters for both general (EAP) and specific (ESP) needs.
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Granger, S., & Paquot, M. (2014). The Louvain EAP Dictionary (LEAD): A tailor-made web-based tool for non-native academic writers of English. American Association of Corpus Linguistics, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/216894