Horváth József. Advanced Writing in English as a Foreign Language: A Corpus-Based Study of Processes and Products

Lingua Franca Csoport, 2001. — 194 pages. — ISBN: 963-641-850-0.This is a cross-disciplinary undertaking: it is informed by writing pedagogy via classroom observations made over the years of Writing and Research Skills courses. It is also motivated by current empirical interest in exploiting machine-readable collections of written and spoken texts for language description, lexicography, discourse analysis and corpus-based language education techniques such as data-driven learning. The fundamental question it attempts to explore and answer is how the description of scripts written by advanced Hungarian university students of EFL can contribute to an understanding of writing processes and products.Why develop a learner corpus? The endeavor holds potential benefits in at least three areas, each of which will be explored in this book:* to collect evidence of language use;
* to serve as a basis of research;
* to serve as a basis of innovative pedagogical application.Chapter One sets the context of the study by providing a description and analysis of theoretical issues and empirical research in the fields of contrastive rhetoric, writing pedagogy and materials development. It presents the outcomes of continued cooperation between the teaching profession and academia. Chapter Two then pursues how this can be done by presenting relevant corpus linguistic research. After an analysis of the underlying theoretical considerations and a historical overview of the development of the corpus linguistic method, it aims to provide a detailed explanation of variables in corpus planning, development and manipulation. Following the reviews, Chapter Three presents, employing a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, the writing pedagogy procedures at the English Department of Janus Pannonius University, focusing on the Writing and Research Skills courses. Chapter Four presents compositional details of the JFU Corpus and the results of empirical research.