Search the digital library catalog

Abstract: There is a growing need for the development of at least some academic vocabulary in students of EFL (studying English for teaching and non-teaching purposes), if one of the main aims of EFL study is to produce competent users of English. Students are expected to read and understand advanced professional texts, not simply to successfully complete their degrees but to become a part of educated society, and to be able to meet the demands placed upon their knowledge in a prefessional environment. The reading and understanding of professional texts can be a highly demanding activity because of the number of academic and professional terms such texts include. This paper exemplifies the usefulness of a gap-fill exercise, as one among a range of options for developing and testing academic vocabulary in a professional context. The exercise was compiled with AWL gapmaker based on a professional review text, which includes academic items of vocabulary. The gap-fill exercise was used with two groups of EFL students in the same year of study and installed at two difficulty levels for two reasons: to test students' existing knowledge of academic vocabulary, and to enrich it through the analysis of words in context/co-text relation using a concordancing program. The paper compares the answers of both groups to determine the most problematic entries (incorrect answers), and to provide the possible reasons for them. Further, contextual clues are taken into consideration as a helpful source for determining correct entries, and tested with the concordancing program. Besides the emphasis on the usefulness of such gap-fill exercises combined with corpus for the development and enrichment of academic vocabulary, the paper also emphasizes the importance of guiding students in how to search for different grammatical and other contextual clues to make correct inferences, and how to use concordances to support or reject the claims.
Keywords: English, foreign languages, scientific language, scientific vocabulary, academic vocabulary, corpus linguistics, academic teaching, didactics
Published in DKUM: 18.05.2017; Views: 1942; Downloads: 430
Full text (788,40 KB)
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: This dissertation deals with a sociolinguistic analysis of attitudes towards Euro-English (E-E), denoting a specific variety of the English language as is primarily used within the multicultural and multilingual professional contexts of the European Union (EU) institutions. Particularly within the European Commission (EC) English has acquired the role of the primary working language. This is apparent from the most recent figures provided by its translation service, according to which as many as 81.3% of source documents were written in English in 2014 (as compared to 77.6% in 2012 and 62% in 2004), followed by French with only 5%. Consequently, 285 EC representatives from different EU member states were surveyed on their attitudes towards E-E, primarily focusing on those respondents whose mother tongues are not English. Crucially, they were asked to evaluate several sentences that deviated from Standard English according to their perceptions of what is acceptable English usage and what is not. Beforehand, a corpus-based analysis was conducted in order to determine which potentially E-E features to integrate within the acceptability test. Importantly, the authors of the examined EU material are deemed congruent as much as possible with the participants of the attitudinal analysis, as they all work for one of the main EU institutions. The main findings reveal that the high acceptability rates of the proposed deviant sentences among the surveyed non-native English-speaking EC representatives were primarily related to their lower proficiency in the English language and/or mother tongue interference, whereas we argue that the surveyed native speakers accepted most of them because they failed to apply a known language system accurately. Accordingly, we found out that the participants as a whole generally adhere to native models of English, i.e. British English, and thus do not personally endorse a European variety of English as a standard of linguistic correctness in their minds. Although specific usage that differs from the standard use of English has to an extent been developed within the EU institutions, the identified features must be regarded as EU jargon; which may be more or less obvious; rather than a particular E-E variety already expressing common EU culture and identity. We conclude that an independent variety of English, comparable to the Inner or Outer Circle Englishes, neither exists to date nor is in its earliest stage of development within the EU institutions.
Keywords: sociolinguistics, attitudes towards language, Euro-English, lingua franca, European Commission, working language, corpus linguistics, linguistic features, competence in English.
Published in DKUM: 13.06.2016; Views: 1623; Downloads: 179
Full text (5,78 MB)