Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana

Lew, Robert

Rees, Geraint

Roberts, Jonathan C.

Sharma, Nirwan

English

One consequence of the digital revolution in lexicography is that there is less use of stand-alone dictionaries, with the emphasis moving to digital tools geared towards very specific tasks (Lew 2015: 7). Writing stands out as amongst the most demanding tasks requiring lexical support, with academic writing a particular challenge, given that there are no native users of academic language (Hyland 2006; Kosem 2010; Frankenberg-Garcia 2017). Our Collocaid project addresses the demand for collocational information during the writing of academic English texts (English for Academic Purposes, or EAP), given that academic language has distinct conventions to general language

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   PRIFYSGOL BANGOR / BANGOR UNIVERSITY  Beyond a Static Dictionary: Helping Writers with Academic EnglishCollocationsLew, Robert; Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Rees, Geraint;Sharma, NirwanPublished: 01/06/2018Early version, also known as pre-printCyswllt i'r cyhoeddiad / Link to publicationDyfyniad o'r fersiwn a gyhoeddwyd / Citation for published version (APA):Lew, R., Frankenberg-Garcia, A., Roberts, J. C., Rees, G., & Sharma, N. (2018). Beyond aStatic Dictionary: Helping Writers with Academic English Collocations. Abstract from The 12thInternational Conference of the Asian Association for Lexicographers, Krabi, Thailand.Hawliau Cyffredinol / General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/orother copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legalrequirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of privatestudy or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access tothe work immediately and investigate your claim. 07. Jul. 2020Beyond a static dictionary:  Helping writers with Academic English collocations Robert Lew1, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia2, Jonathan C. Roberts3, Geraint P. Rees2, Nirwan Sharma3 1Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, 2University of Surrey, UK, 3Bangor University, UK Subfield: 1. electronic and digital revolution in lexicography Keywords: writing assistant; collocation; academic writing; English for Academic Purposes Abstract One consequence of the digital revolution in lexicography is that there is less use of stand-alone dictionaries, with the emphasis moving to digital tools geared towards very specific tasks (Lew 2015: 7). Writing stands out as amongst the most demanding tasks requiring lexical support, with academic writing a particular challenge, given that there are no native users of academic language (Hyland 2006; Kosem 2010; Frankenberg-Garcia 2017).  Our Collocaid project addresses the demand for collocational information during the writing of academic English texts (English for Academic Purposes, or EAP), given that academic language has distinct conventions to general language. The project is strongly corpus-based. First, a list of relevant collocational bases (aka nodes) has been created, drawing on existing corpus-based academic vocabulary lists (in particular Gardner and Davies 2014). At the next step, the list of salient and useful collocates for these lexical nodes are being identified in corpora of academic English.  Our tool will be implemented as a real-time writing assistant, designed to prompt writers of EAP texts with appropriate collocates whenever they need help, while being minimally disruptive to the writing process. To that end, we are building on insights from recent research in information visualization (Roberts et al. 2017), as well as enriching our lexical database with negative information, that is typical collocational errors attested in corpora of novice academic writers. We are planning to conduct usability studies of the prototype of the tool so that EAP writers get the optimal degree and type of prompting to produce more idiomatic texts without disrupting their writing process. We hope to have our initial prototype ready for Asialex 2018, and would like to demonstrate it during the conference and receive expert feedback from the delegates. References: Frankenberg-Garcia, A. 2017. Assessing the Productive Collocation Repertoire of Writers for the Development of Dedicated Writing Assistant Tools.  Electronic Lexicography in the 21st Century (eLex 2017). Leiden.  Gardner, D. and M. Davies. 2014. ‘A New Academic Vocabulary List.’ Applied Linguistics 35.3: 305-327. Hyland, K. 2006. English for Academic Purposes: An Advanced Resource Book. London/New York: Routledge. Kosem, I. 2010. Designing a Model for a Corpus-Driven Dictionary of Academic English. Ph.D. Thesis, Aston University. Lew, R. 2015. ‘Dictionaries and Their Users’ In Hanks, P. and G.-M. De Schryver (eds), International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography.  Springer, 1-9. Roberts, J. C., A. Frankenberg-Garcia, R. Lew, G. Rees and J. Pereda. 2017. ‘Visualisation and graphical techniques to help writers write more idiomatically’. Poster presented at the IEEE Conference on Visualization (VIS), October 1-6, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2017. 

Beyond a Static Dictionary: Helping Writers with Academic English Collocations

https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/28622413/LEW_1_ASIALEX2018.pdf

Beyond a Static Dictionary: Helping Writers with Academic English Collocations

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