The bilingual academic phrasebook : can it support writers? And how?

This presentation reports on the creation of a bilingual academic phrasebook (or two corresponding phrasebooks in English and German), which is based on two corpora of 20,000 English and 16,000 German documents, as a work in progress. Built on the Manchester Phrasebank methodology, the present project focuses on collecting phrases and examining connections between the two languages. What we refer to as a phrasebook is a collection of expressions used to perform the most important speech acts in academic papers. As an inventory of frequently used expressions in research articles and theses, the collection is a representation of the functional aspects of academic language and, as such, may be viewed as a rhetoric for academic texts. In the presentation, we describe how phrases are selected and organized along the IMRD sequence in order to correspond with the composition process. We also outline a theoretical framework grounded in genre theory, rhetoric and linguistics to provide the basis for the phrasebook’s planned pedagogical uses, as well as lay some foundations for this branch of research. In addition, we demonstrate how the phrases may be used to support authors in a digital learning environment called Thesis Writer, in which the phrases are available to writers when their papers demand certain speech acts. The most important part of our presentation will be a reflection on the parallelism of German and English expressions, with a brief overview of some of the similarities and differences in frequencies found when comparing the two languages. While the phrasebook is a key component in the structure of Thesis Writer, our intention is to make it available as a separate digital tool to be used independently. Concluding, we summarize our experience thus far with the uses and limitations of academic phrases in the teaching of academic writing, both in L1 and L2