Academic writing at university: a case study

Abstract

English majors in Brazil must attend a number of subjects as part of their curriculum, including a topic designed to teach them academic writing. In this subject, students need to show evidence of the acquisition of academic discourse in the foreign language but also provide evidence of their mastery of academic lexis. The present work describes the lexis in the written production of a class of English majors in Brazil, using Corpus Linguistics as methodology. To this end, a corpus of freshman academic writing was compiled and digitalized. As a reference corpus one of the components of the BAWE (British Academic Writing in English) was used, which consists of essays written in English by Humanities undergraduates, whose mother tongue is English. Digital tools helped extract, count and compare the most frequent lexical phrases used by both Brazilian and British students. The research uses long-established methodology for the treatment of n-grams to unveil a feature of English language acquisition, namely the frequent use of academic vocabulary on the part of apprentice writers when dealing with argumentative writing as part of their university studies.