Design and preliminary analysis of a corpus of research articles: contributions to academic literacy
Abstract
This paper aims to describe the process of design, construction, and preliminary analysis of a corpus of Applied Linguistics research articles written in English. The corpus was created as a tool to facilitate the teaching and learning of academic reading and writing skills in two programs at the National University of Rio Cuarto: Profesorado/Licenciatura en Inglés. The texts collected are aimed to be used to study a frequent resource in academic writing, nominalization, with a focus on its potential to encode ideational grammatical metaphors, as defined by Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). This paper describes the motivation for the study and provides a brief summary of the theoretical framework informing its different stages. It also elaborates on the decisions made about different aspects of corpus design, the relationship between the corpus and the academic context where it is intended to be used, and the linguistic features of the texts collected. The quantitative data emerging from a computer-assisted analysis is then presented in the form of a list of all the nouns formed by suffixation derived from adjectives (deadjectival) and verbs (deverbal) with the potential to create grammatical metaphors. To conclude, suggestions for future qualitative analysis are presented with the aim of contributing to the development of academic reading and writing skills in the aforementioned context.
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