ESP writing: Developing business students’ ability to technicalize

Beschreibung

This paper proposes an explanatory model of business students’ ability to technicalize in an L2 English writing task. Despite the importance of technicality for discipline-specific writing, so far little attention has been paid to identifying the discourse patterns characteristic of this type of writing. Previous research has tended to conceive of technicality as a lexico-grammatical rather than discourse phenomenon, owing to research methodology that has predominantly deployed frequency-based tools. Drawing on a self-compiled specialized corpus, the corpus of Academic Business English (ABE), these methodological limitations will be addressed by adopting a mixed-methods approach that combines bottom-up corpus analyses with top-down content analyses of larger portions of discourse. The ABE corpus consists of c. 1 million tokens, including more than 400 seminar papers produced by advanced business students. The pedagogic genre of the seminar paper is an argued text which, in this particular ESP setting, continues to be the standard type of assessed writing. Technicalizing will be introduced as a two-stage process in which the student writers elaborate on technical terms by means of defining, exemplifying and explaining. The findings have important implications for developing business students’ writing skills in view of the pedagogic challenges they meet in current specific-purpose instruction.

Zeitraum	1 Juni 2017 → 3 Juni 2017
Ereignistitel	FACES OF ENGLISH 2: TEACHING AND RESEARCHING ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL ENGLISH
Veranstaltungstyp	Keine Angaben
Bekanntheitsgrad	International