Corpus analysis of academic discourse featuresimplications for eap/esp writing

Abstract

The dissertation investigates features of academic texts with the methods associated with corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. The features under study are hedges, syntactic constructions such as clefts, finite and non-finite adverbial clauses, and linguistic complexity indices. All these features are assumed to play a crucial role in understanding peculiarities of academic discourse which is important not only from a theoretical viewpoint contributing to the description of an academic text, but also has practical implications for EAP/ESP pedagogy. The realisation of the features in academic discourse, namely in published research articles in different disciplines and project proposals written by undergraduate students, has been investigated. It has been revealed that there are significant differences in the use of hedges and complexity features both in terms of learner and expert writing and between various disciplines. On the basis of the research findings, study materials employing corpus examples, have been developed.