ISU Campus The main focus of my research work in the past few years evolved from the study on the use of lexical bundles in academic writing that I completed for my dissertation. The results of that study demonstrated a big difference between the ways in which published authors and university students use these word combinations. I have made several presentations on lexical bundles both locally (Arlington, VA; Indianapolis, IN; Ames, IA; Ann Arbor, M; Flagstaff, AZ) and internationally (Buenos Aires, Argentina; Limerick, Ireland; Madrid and Castellón, Spain; Villahermosa, Mexico). In addition, most of my publications are also based on the analysis of lexical bundles in academic writing. Those studies sparked my interest in the ways academic communities produce written documents for the dissemination of knowledge, particularly, the different conventions that different disciplines use when writing publishable research articles. The study also motivated me to go beyond the English language in the study of word combinations. I will explain these new research paths in the following sections.
I have been teaching English 101D, an academic writing class for international graduate students, ever since I came to Iowa State University. I love the class but I did not like the material. I also thought that the book used for this course could be replaced by a corpus of academic writing in the disciplines made up of research articles from well-known journals. That was the origin of English 101D – CB (corpus-based). The core of this course is the Iowa State University Research Article Corpus (ISU RAC), a collection 20 million words of academic writing from journal articles in more than 20 different disciplines. The project, which was originally funded by the Liberal Arts and Science Computer Advisory Committee (LASCAC) at Iowa State, is based on the actual research done on academic writing in the disciplines by prestigious linguists, discourse analysts, and rhetoricians such as John Swales, Ken Hyland, Carol Berkenkotter, and Tom Huckin among others. These research studies provide the rationale for the course, which includes excerpts from these studies that students in English 101D – CB read to get informed. Later, students research the writing of their own fields using the corpus. The ultimate objective of the course is to help students write their own research article of publishable quality.
Perhaps the most challenging part of the project was the design of a computer program for the identification of linguistic features in any text. The design of Word Search was a very important part of the English 101D – CB curriculum. Using a program specially designed for this course (Word Search) has two main advantages. The first one is very practical: we do not need to buy a Concordancer with an Institutional license. The second reason is also practical and course-oriented: using this program with students will allow me to tailor the program to the course and to our students’ needs. After piloting the course for several semesters, offering only one or two sections of the course at a time, in the spring 2007 all sections of English 101D were corpus-based and taught following the curriculum previously described.
The corpus collected for English 101D – CB and the papers produced by the students in this course will be used in several studies conducted by students in the MA TESL/Applied Linguistics program for their theses. Some of these theses are corpus-based studies which will investigate the use of various linguistic features in disciplinary writing. I am planning to use the corpus to go further in the analysis of lexical bundles in research papers, particularly in the different sections of the research article and to try to draw comparisons across academic disciplines.
Currently, I am especially interested in the use of lexical bundles in disciplinary writing in Spanish, particularly in history writing. Butler (1998) studied word combinations in Spanish, but his corpus is made up of language in Spanish newspapers. With the help of a small grant funded by the Liberal Arts and Science College at ISU in 2003, I have collected a one million word corpus of history writing in Spanish from Argentine history journals. The findings of the analysis of the bundles identified in the corpus and a comparative analysis of the use of these expressions in English and Spanish will be the topic of my next publication.
Having a bilingual corpus of Spanish and English history writing will provide me with opportunities for a contrastive analysis in various aspects of academic writing in both languages, an area of investigation which has been neglected for many years. I have great hopes for this project, and although it may sound overwhelming, I feel I can accomplish it, considering my experience, training, and energy. I feel this project will add to the understanding of the use of word combinations in academic prose by native and non-native speakers of English, which in turn will benefit the fields of phraseology, and discourse and contrastive analysis.