Publication details
Investigating Academic Writing in the ELF Context: A Comparative Study of Dissertation Abstracts [presentation]
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | While EFL education in general is still dominated by native-speaker modelling, in the field of academic writing the main focus has recently shifted towards the apprentice-expert continuum in which English functions effectively as a lingua franca (ELF). Following these assumptions, the paper presents the results of a comparative study of dissertation abstracts yielding insights into the issue of nativeness and the role of formal education in the context of academic writing. The main aim of the paper is to examine the degree of correspondence between the selected sets of academic abstracts as regards the lexicogrammatical profile and logical structuring, and to find out to what extent the differences and similarities are determined by the native language of the authors and the formal training in academic writing they might have received throughout the course of their educational experience. The analysis exploits data from two small-scale comparable corpora (geography-related disciplines), which include dissertation abstracts submitted by Czech students of Masaryk University by students of the University of Michigan. |