LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN "THESIS WRITER": CORPUS-BASED ACADEMIC PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN

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1 ELN INAUGURAL CONFERENCE, PRAGUE, 7-8 NOVEMBER 2015 EUROPEAN LITERACY NETWORK: RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS Panel session Recent trends in Bachelor s dissertation/thesis research: foci, methods, approaches LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN "THESIS WRITER": CORPUS-BASED ACADEMIC PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN Dr Madalina Chitez Language Competence Centre (LCC) Centre for Academic Writing (CAW)

2 CONTENT Introduction Ø A new Academic Writing tool: Thesis Writer Methods in linguistic support tool integration Construction of an academic phrase book Ø Compilation Ø Examples of academic phrases in EN versus DE 2 Didactic relevance

3 A NEW ACADEMIC WRITING TOOL: THESIS WRITER - designed and constructed jointly by the Department of Applied Linguistics and Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland 3 - the tool is designed to help students who use either English or German (both as L1 and L2) to write their bachelor or master theses in economics.

4 A NEW ACADEMIC WRITING TOOL: THESIS WRITER Thesis Writer supports students by: (1) structuring the writing process; (2) providing short tutorials for all major steps and actions; (3) offering a proposal wizard to guide students through the critical issues of the thesis proposal structure; (4) supporting the transfer of the proposal into the final version of the thesis 4 (5) offering help with organizing and revising the thesis.

5 A NEW ACADEMIC WRITING TOOL: 5 THESIS WRITER

6 THESIS WRITER: TESEC CORPUS COMPILATION - TESEC corpus: Economics Corpus of Student Theses in - Size: words: w. in TESEC-DE; w. in TESEC-EN 6 - Processing: text compilation (internet retrieval) metadata encoding text correction (footnotes, tables, numbers etc.)

7 THESIS WRITER: TECHNICAL DETAILS - The technical platform for Thesis Writer is driven by a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) developed with the PHPbased framework yii1 following strict design patterns for objectoriented programming and the principles of model-viewcontroller - The corpus is stored in a database. IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) enables various queries and actions on the corpus via a number of command line prompts resulting in outputs. 7 - To allow the user to perform queries via highlighting and selecting text and using the linguistic support, a Perl script collection and a number of PHP classes mediate between the GUI of Thesis Writer and the command line tools of CWB.

8 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: ACCESS: 8

9 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: CONSTRUCTION OF AN ACADEMIC PHRASE BOOK (1) - Academic phrases in theory: the collection of information on academic writing phraseology from textbooks or online informative materials 9 - Academic phrases within the research cycle: the lists of phrases extracted from literature were re-arranged in order to match the sections in Thesis Writer: (1) Topic / Research Question (2) Relevance (3) Research Gap / Knowledge Gap (4) State of the Art (5) Method / Procedure, (6) Discussion (7) Results (8) Conclusions

10 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: CONSTRUCTION OF AN ACADEMIC PHRASE BOOK (2): PHRASES FOR PROPOSAL Proposal Topic EN DE Topic Thema This study addresses the issue of This work contributes to research in The focus of this work is will be discussed in this work. This work primarily deals with will be presented in this work. will not be discussed in this work. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Die Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zu der Forschung... Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit ist... In dieser Arbeit wird... behandelt. In dieser Arbeit geht es um In dieser Arbeit soll... dargestellt werden Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist Nicht behandelt wird... 10

11 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: CONSTRUCTION OF AN ACADEMIC PHRASE BOOK (3): PHRASES FOR THESIS - Keywords in academic phrase lists: identification of several academic keywords. - Academic phrase book construction: Using corpus linguistics methodology, each identified keyword was analysed with the help of a concordance software, which can make instant searches in the self-compiled English and German corpora. (a) the software retrieved the clusters in which the indicated keyword was included; (b) the analysis was conducted in such a way that the most frequent collocation patterns at the left and right position (+/- 5 words) could be filtered out. (c) from the compiled lists, the most frequent and/or most typical academic-writing phrases were extracted and complied into a discipline-specific academic phrase book. 11 Two main strategies led to the identification of the most relevant academic phrases:

12 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: 12 CONSTRUCTION OF AN ACADEMIC PHRASE BOOK (4): PHRASES FOR THESIS

13 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: CONSTRUCTION OF AN ACADEMIC PHRASE BOOK (5): PHRASES FOR THESIS (EN VS DE) Introducing topic Keyword theme The central theme of the dissertation is The main theme addressed is role plays an important/significant role in aim The aim of this study/research is new Propose/provide/implement/introduce a new approach 13

14 LINGUISTIC SUPPORT IN THESIS WRITER: CONSTRUCTION OF AN ACADEMIC PHRASE BOOK (6): PHRASES FOR THESIS (EN VS DE) Thema Thema nennen befassen (deal with) widmen (dedicate) beschränken (restrict) Example Der Bericht befasst sich ausschließlich mit um sich anschließend den weniger bedeutsamen Daten zu widmen Deshalb beschränkt sich die Darstellung auf Die vorliegende Arbeit beschränkt sich dabei auf die auf welche die folgenden Abschnitte näher eingehen (elaborate on) eingehen 14

15 DIDACTIC RELEVANCE (1) Support during writer s block: - students might sometimes have difficulties in identifying the right words/phrases - find out which possible constructions would fit their needs - not as a copy-paste procedure 15 - prevent plagiarism that by programming the searches to be retrieved only at a limited left-right number of words.

16 DIDACTIC RELEVANCE (2) Rhetoric support: 16 - students sometimes lack the rhetoric awareness of a specific academic genre - TW can help them identify the right argumentative or academic phrase at the time and place they need it.

17 DIDACTIC RELEVANCE (3) - Risk: by using the academic phrase list might prevent creativity and encourage repetitions in student writing Anticipation: diversity of research-cycle-based academic phrases extracted from the corpus (supplemented with the free search in corpus, where students can take inspiration for creating their own repertoire of academic phrases) will be evaluated positively by users.

18 18 Thank you for your attention!

19 19 Flyer Thesis 2015

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