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Context and the researching and teaching of academic writing
Brian Paltridge - The University of Sydney (Australia)

We can no longer assume that there is one type of literacy in the academy and that there is one ‘culture’ in the university whose norms and practices simply have to be learnt in order for students to succeed in the academy. People working in the area of academic literacies, further, have argued that learning to write in the academy involves acquiring a repertoire of linguistic practices which are based on complex sets of discourses, identities, and values. These practices, however, vary according to context, culture and genre. This presentation discusses how these issues can be taken up in the researching and teaching of academic writing. It does this by considering ways in which the context in which students’ writing is produced impacts on the texts they are expected to produce and how students can be made aware of this as they are constructing their texts.

 

Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney. His publications include the Companion to Discourse Analysis edited with Ken Hyland (Continuum 2011), the second edition of his book Discourse Analysis (Bloomsbury 2012), and the Handbook of English for Specific Purposes edited with Sue Starfield (Wiley-Blackwell 2103). He has recently completed, with Sue Starfield and Christine Tardy, a book on ethnographic perspectives on academic writing to be published by Oxford University Press and is currently writing, also with Sue Starfield, a book on getting published in academic journals to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is a current editor of TESOL Quarterly, an editor emeritus for the journal English for Specific Purposes, general editor for the University of Sydney Papers in TESOL, and member of the editorial board for Writing & Pedagogy, the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, the Chinese Journal of ESP, the Taiwan International ESP Journal, the English Australia Journal, and the International Journal for Researcher Development.

Brian Paltridge

 

The University of Sydney (Australia)

The treatment of domain-specific collocations in learner's dictionaries: a corpus-based approach
Yukio Tono - Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japan)

ESP vocabulary is essential in English language teaching for academic or occupational purposes. Learning domain-specific vocabulary, however, is not as easy as one can imagine because it it not sufficient to know the meaning of each technical term independently, but learners also need to know how to use them in context. The present study focuses on the analysis of domain-specific vs. domain-neutral collocations using a large collection of ESP texts called the SEKAI Corpus, developed for in-house use for lexicographical work at Shogakukan Inc. The collocation analyses comparing the frequencies of the given words across different domains show that the same words will be used differently in different domains and the differences in word behavior can be best illustrated with frequent collocates to co-occur with them. The latest version of the Shogakukan Progressive English-Japanese Dictionary has special columns featuring domain-specific collocations. The author will discuss the process of collocation analysis and its implications for ESP teaching and materials development.

 

Yukio Tono is Professor in Corpus Linguistics at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His research interest is in corpus linguistics (especially learner corpora and applications of corpora for English language teaching), second language vocabulary acquisition, and pedagogical lexicography.

 

Judy Noguchi is professor of English in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Mukogawa Women’s University.  She also teaches English for science at the high school attached to the university and English for specific purposes at the Graduate School of Engineering and of Medicine at Osaka University. She has been involved in the development of numerous ESP textbooks for Japanese students, especially in science, engineering and medical fields. Her research interests include the development of ESP corpora (PERC, JECPRESE, OnCAL) and their analyses and ESP teaching techniques. She is currently president of the Kansai Chapter of JACET (Japan Association of College English Teachers).

Learning English as a foreign language in Japan can be a challenging enterprise, especially if the language is needed for academic or professional purposes. The question arises of how to bridge the gap between the low proficiency levels displayed by a majority of undergraduate students in Japan and the target performance levels. One possible answer comes from work done in the field of English (or languages) for specific purposes. Particularly helpful is the work related to genre analysis which allows the identification of rhetorical and lexicogrammatical patterns of texts to enable explicit teaching of target genres. Developing suitable teaching materials based on such concepts can raise student motivation to actively work with texts related to their area of interest and can also help equip students with the knowledge and tools to aid them in future encounters with new genres. Specific examples of exercises and classroom techniques will be introduced for undergraduate as well as graduate level courses in science and engineering, pharmaceutical science, and medicine.

 

Materials development based on genre awareness
(click on title to view this slideshow)
Judy Noguchi - Mukogawa Women’s University (Japan)

Judy Noguchi

 

Mukogawa Women’s University (Japan)

Yukio Tono

 

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japan)

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