Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing: From Extraction to Analysis

`One of the most controversial issues in EAP curriculum development is the question of whether the focus of instruction should be geared toward general academic instruction or toward discipline-specific features. The work of Magali Paquot shows that there exists a culture of academic literacy signalled by a range of non-technical vocabulary which can be used by undergraduate students in diverse disciplines, particularly those words or phrases for marking major academic functions, such as defining, exemplifying, classifying, and reporting the viewpoints of other scholars. This book holds important implications for teachers of academic writing to all novice writers, both native and non-native. The findings the author has presented should be incorporated into materials development for undergraduate teaching.' Joanne Neff van Aertselaer, Centro Superior de Idiomas Modernos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Academic vocabulary is in fashion, as witnessed by the increasing number of textbooks published on the topic. In the first part of Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing, Magali Paquot scrutinizes the concept of `academic vocabulary' and proposes a corpus-driven procedure based on the criteria of keyness, range and evenness of distribution to select academic words that could be part of a common-core academic vocabulary syllabus. In the second part of the book, Paquot offers a thorough analysis of academic vocabulary in the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and describes the factors that account for learners' difficulties in academic writing. She then focuses on the role of corpora, and more particularly learner corpora, in EAP material design. It is the first monograph in which Granger's (1996) Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis is used to compare 10 ICLE learner sub-corpora. Linguistic features that are shared by learners from a wide range of mother-tongue backgrounds are highlighted, as well as unique features that may be transfer-related.

Magali Paquot is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.