In search of a General Academic Vocabulary: A Corpus-driven Study

Granger, Sylviane;Paquot, Magali
(2009) Options and Practices of LSP Practitioners — Location: University of Crete (7.February.2009)

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(en) Recent studies in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) have brought to light a high degree of variation across academic texts and led some authors to question the usefulness of a general EAP approach. Some highlight differences between disciplines (e.g. Hyland 2000) or even sub-disciplines (e.g. Ozturk 2007). Others show that the use of linguistic features varies across text types (e.g. Hyland and Tse 2007) and sections (e.g. Martínez 2003). These findings pose a tremendous challenge to ELT practitioners who are regularly faced with mixed groups of students, most notably in EAP programmes for international students. In addition, general EAP textbooks have been criticized for being a poor reflection of authentic use (Paltridge 2002). Teachers and material designers arguably need more corpus-based research into the nature and extent of General Academic English. In our presentation we will report the preliminary results of the investigation of a new ESP corpus, the 'Varieties of English for Specific Purposes DAtabase' (VESPA), which contains scientific articles from top journals in three domains: business, medicine and linguistics. We will extract the lexical verbs from the three subcorpora and analyse them with a view to identifying the similarities and differences between them and extracting a common core that can be taught in a general EAP context. The investigation is part of a wider study into EAP vocabulary (De Cock et al 2007; Gilquin et al 2007; Paquot 2007) and is a follow up of a previous study that compares the use of lexical verbs in academic writing by native writers and intermediate/advanced EFL learners (Granger & Paquot forthcoming).
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Granger, S., & Paquot, M. (2009). In search of a General Academic Vocabulary: A Corpus-driven Study. In Katsampoxaki-Hodgetts K. (ed.), Options and Practices of LSP Practitioners (pp. 94-108). University of Crete Publications. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/229737