ARTICLE IN PRESS

Journal of
E NGLISH for
A CADEMIC
Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6 (2007) 319–335
P URPOSES
www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap

Learner corpora: The missing link in EAP pedagogy

Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Sylviane Granger, Magali Paquot
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, F.N.R.S, Université catholique de Louvain, Collège Erasme,
Place Blaise Pascal 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Abstract

This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data
produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP)
pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field.
Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based analyses of academic writing, the article
zooms in on learner corpora, describing some of the findings that emerge from corpus studies of L2
learners’ EAP writing. The next section examines the use of corpora in EAP materials design and
shows that the few existing corpus-informed EAP tools tend to be based on native corpora only. The
article then reports on a collaborative corpus-based project between the Centre for English Corpus
Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain) and Macmillan Education, which aims to describe a
number of rhetorical functions particularly prominent in academic writing. The analysis of learner
corpus data and their comparison with data from native corpora have highlighted a number of
problems which non-native learners experience when writing academic essays, e.g., lack of register
awareness, phraseological infelicities, and semantic misuse. In this article, we illustrate how these
findings were used to inform a 30-page academic writing section in the second edition of the
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.
r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Corpus linguistics; Learner corpora; English for academic purposes; Materials design; Phraseology;
Dictionary

Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +32 10 474034.

E-mail addresses: gilquin@lige.ucl.ac.be (G. Gilquin), granger@lige.ucl.ac.be (S. Granger),
paquot@lige.ucl.ac.be (M. Paquot).

1475-1585/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2007.09.007
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1. Introduction

Computer corpora have secured a key role in most language-related fields, from
lexicography to language teaching through natural language processing and literary
criticism. The corpus wave has spread to the English for academic purposes (EAP) field but
a look at the literature and pedagogical materials shows that EAP researchers and
materials writers mainly use native corpora. Learner corpora, that is corpora containing
data produced by L2 learners—both foreign and second language learners—are seldom
analysed, which is regrettable as they hold tremendous potential for EAP studies. L2
learners admittedly share a number of difficulties with novice native writers but they have
also been proven to have their own distinctive problems, which a careful corpus-based
investigation can help uncover. The aim of this article is to show that analysing learner
corpus data is an effective way of ‘‘operationalizing writing difficulties’’ (Bitchener &
Basturkmen, 2006, p. 14).
The article is structured as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we highlight the respective
contribution of corpora in general, and learner corpora in particular. Sections 4 and 5
focus on EAP materials design, with, in Section 4, a brief survey of corpus-based EAP
materials, followed by the presentation, in Section 5, of one concrete achievement in the
field of pedagogical lexicography, the integration of learner-corpus-informed materials
into the new edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. Section 6
concludes the article.

2. The contribution of corpora to EAP

John Flowerdew (2002) identifies four distinct major research paradigms for
investigating EAP, namely (Swalesian) genre analysis, contrastive rhetoric, ethnographic
approaches and corpus-based analysis. While the first three approaches to EAP place
emphasis on the situational or cultural context of academic discourse, corpus-linguistic
methods focus more on the co-text of selected lexical items in academic texts. This co-
textual approach has enabled corpus-linguistic studies to make two significant contribu-
tions to the field of EAP: detailed descriptions of its distinctive linguistic features, and
more specifically its highly specific phraseology, and careful analyses of linguistic
variability across academic genres and disciplines.
Corpus linguistics is concerned with the collection and analysis of large amounts of
naturally occurring spoken or written data in electronic format, ‘‘selected according to
external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source
of linguistic research’’ (Sinclair, 2005, p. 16). Computer corpora are analysed with the help
of software packages such as WordSmith Tools 4 (Scott, 2004), which includes a number
of text-handling tools to support quantitative and qualitative textual data analysis.
Wordlists give information on the frequency and distribution of the vocabulary—single
words but also word sequences—used in one or more corpora. Wordlists for two corpora
can be compared automatically so as to highlight the vocabulary that is particularly salient
in a given corpus, i.e., its keywords or key word sequences. Concordances are used to
analyse the co-text of a linguistic feature, i.e., its linguistic environment in terms of
preferred co-occurrences and grammatical structures. More sophisticated tools are
currently being developed to help researchers explore large corpora. For example, the
Sketch Engine provides ‘‘word sketches’’, i.e., ‘‘one-page automatic, corpus-based
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summaries of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour’’ (Kilgarriff, Rychlý,

Smrz, & Tugwell, 2004). Frequency is a key issue as corpus-based studies aim to provide
automated descriptions of what is frequent and typical in the corpus under examination.
The research paradigm of corpus linguistics is thus ideally suited for studying the linguistic
features of academic discourse as it can highlight which words, phrases or structures are
most typical of the genre and how they are generally used.
Corpus-based studies have shed light on a number of distinctive linguistic features of
academic discourse as compared with other genres. Biber, Johansson, Conrad, and
Finegan (1999) have shown, for example, that nouns, nominalisations, derivational suffixes
and linking adverbials are particularly frequent in academic prose while private verbs, that-
deletions and contractions occur very rarely. Studies of vocabulary in academic prose have
stressed the importance of a sub-technical vocabulary that is common to a wide range of
academic texts and disciplines and that is typically used to serve organisational or
rhetorical functions prominent in academic writing, e.g., introducing a topic, hypothesis-
ing, exemplifying, explaining, evaluating, concluding (cf. Luzón Marco, 2001; Thurstun &
Candlin, 1998). Several studies have pointed to the existence of an EAP-specific
phraseology characterised by word combinations that are essentially semantically and
syntactically compositional, e.g., in the presence of, the aim of this study, the extent to
which, it has been suggested, it is likely that (Biber et al., 1999). These studies have also
shown that the phraseology of academic discourse is highly conventionalised and that
novice writers differ from professional writers in their use of EAP-specific lexical bundles
(Cortes, 2002).
With the recent development of specialised genre-based corpora (cf. Flowerdew, 2002,
p. 96), the field of academic discourse research has witnessed a rapid increase in the
number of studies on variability within academic texts. Studies have investigated the
similarities and differences between different genres within the same academic discipline
(e.g., Conrad, 1996). Others have described differences in the same genre across several
disciplines (e.g., Fløttum, Dahl, & Kinn, 2006; Hyland, 2000) and even sub-disciplines
(e.g., Ozturk, 2007). Some studies have also compared the use of linguistic features across
text sections (e.g., Biber & Finegan, 1994; Martı́nez, 2003).
A number of these variationist studies have also focused on the phraseological
preferences of academic prose and have shown that phraseological patterns may differ
across genres and disciplines. They have also suggested that phraseological patterns
correlate closely with the communicative purposes that they serve in different genres or
disciplines (Charles, 2006; Groom, 2005) and with the rhetorical functions that they
perform in specific text sections (Gledhill, 2000). Thus, these studies support Hyland’s
(2002) plea for as much specificity as possible in the teaching of EAP at university but, as
will be discussed in Section 4, their pedagogical implementation is not without its problems.

3. The contribution of learner corpora to EAP

The distinctive, highly routinised, nature of EAP proves undeniably problematic for
many (especially novice) native writers, but it poses an even greater challenge to non-native
writers. Until recently, it was quite difficult to form a precise picture of learner EAP
writing, but learner corpus research has the potential to offer a major breakthrough
as researchers now have access to large databases of learner data and powerful methods
of analysis.
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Learner corpora are a relatively new addition to the wide range of existing corpus types
(cf. McEnery, Xiao, & Tono (2006) for a survey of corpus resources). Their specificity
resides in the fact that they contain data from foreign or second language learners. More
than any other, this type of corpus needs to be compiled on the basis of strict design
criteria in order to control the wide range of variables that affect learner language, both
learner variables (age, proficiency level, mother tongue background, etc.) and task
variables (field, genre, topic, etc.) (Granger, 2002). Learner corpus data offer a number of
significant advantages over other types of learner data: the corpora are usually quite large
and therefore give researchers a much wider empirical basis than has ever been available
before; they can be submitted to a wide range of automated methods and tools which make
it possible to quantify learner data, to enrich them with a wide range of linguistic
annotations (e.g., morpho-syntactic tagging, discourse tagging, and error tagging) and to
manipulate them in various ways in order to uncover their distinctive lexico-grammatical
and stylistic signatures. One method of analysis, contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA)
(Gilquin, 2000/2001; Granger, 1996), has played a key role in identifying L2-specific
features. This methodology, which is very popular among learner corpus researchers,
involves two types of comparison: comparisons of learner language and one or more native
speaker reference corpora (L2 vs. L1), and comparisons of different varieties of learner
language (L2 vs. L2). It has been applied to a wide range of linguistic features—
orthographic, lexical, grammatical, phraseological, stylistic, pragmatic—and has brought
to light interesting patterns of overuse, underuse1 and misuse which are helping to fill in
some gaps in our hitherto somewhat patchy knowledge of the different stages of
interlanguage development.
Interest in learner corpora is growing fast and has already generated a range of
stimulating studies, which highlight the potential of this new resource for the EAP field.
Milton and Tsang (1991) were among the first to deplore the lack of sufficient evidence to
quantify students’ problems in written expression and advocate the use of learner corpus
data to compensate for it: ‘‘Without a reliable index of the degree of difficulty that our
students have with the various dimensions of written English such as its lexis, syntax,
pragmatics and semantics, we are left to make do with approximations based on
impressions, anecdotes and manual counts of small samples’’ (p. 216). Similarly,
Flowerdew (2001, p. 364) insists that ‘‘insights gleaned from learner corpora need to be
employed to complement those from expert corpora for syllabus and materials design.’’
She shows how careful investigation of learner corpus data can help uncover three areas of
difficulty in learner EAP writing: collocational patterning, pragmatic appropriacy, and
discourse features. Errors such as we have performed a survey or a questionnaire has been
conveyed to the public reveal that students have some knowledge of key EAP verbs but are
not familiar with their lexico-grammatical patterning. Learner anomalous use of modal
verbs, modal adjuncts, boosters, hedges, etc. causes pragmatic inappropriacy. Hyland and
Milton’s (1997) investigation of expressions of doubt and certainty shows that Cantonese
learners use a more restricted range of epistemic modifiers and have considerable difficulty
conveying the appropriate degrees of qualification and confidence. Finally, as regards
discourse features, quite a number of studies have focused on the use of connectors in EAP

1
It is important to note that the terms ‘‘overuse’’ and ‘‘underuse’’ are descriptive, not prescriptive, terms; they
merely refer to the fact that a linguistic form is found significantly more or less in the learner corpus than in the
reference corpus.
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writing and revealed patterns of overuse, underuse and misuse (Altenberg & Tapper, 1998;
Flowerdew, 1998; Granger & Tyson, 1996; Milton & Tsang, 1991). Other studies highlight
the more general problem of learners’ tendency to adopt an overly spoken style in their
EAP writing. Using a fully automatic method of investigation, Granger and Rayson (1998)
show that learners overuse many lexical and grammatical features typical of speech, such
as frequent use of first and second person pronouns or the use of short Germanic adverbs
(also, only, so, very, etc.), and significantly underuse many of the characteristics of formal
writing, such as a high density of nouns and prepositions. In addition, many of the typical
EAP words (issue, advocate, belief, argument) are typically underrepresented while general
and/or vague nouns (people, thing, problem) are overrepresented.
One important finding emerging from learner-corpus-based studies in general and EAP
in particular is that some of the linguistic features that characterise learner language are
shared by learners from a wide range of mother tongue backgrounds while others are
exclusive to one particular learner population. The shared features can be assumed to be
developmental while the latter are presumably due to transfer from the learners’ mother
tongue. Although further work is needed to consolidate the results, most studies point to a
marked influence of the learners’ L1, in particular as regards (semi-) prefabricated
language (cf. Nesselhauf, 2005; Paquot, in press).
All these studies show that insights gained from learner corpus research have huge
potential for EAP research. However, the overwhelming majority of corpus-based EAP
studies are exclusively based on native corpora. In the call for proposals for this special
issue of JEAP, Thompson (2006, p. 248) quotes a proportion of 40% of corpus-based
articles in 2005 and 2006 issues of JEAP. A close look at the content of the articles shows
that in the overwhelming majority of the cases, corpus based in fact means native-corpus
based. Analyses of L2 learners are not absent but they tend to focus on the writing process
rather than the product and/or use traditional non-corpus-based methods to analyse
learner productions.
Admittedly, some corpus-based studies focus on novice native writing and it can be
assumed that novice native writers share a number of difficulties with non-native writers.
For example, Neff, Ballesteros, Dafouz, Martı́nez, and Rica (2004) show that excessive
visibility of the writer is common to native and non-native student writing. As we will show
below, however, the overlap between novice native and non-native writing is far from
perfect, and quite a few difficulties appear to be specific to learners. This issue of the degree
of overlap between novice native writers and non-native writers has far-reaching
methodological and pedagogical implications and is clearly in need of empirical studies.
The use of non-native speakers’ writing corpora has been advocated by several linguists
and a number of descriptive studies exist on important EAP topics like metadiscourse
(Ädel, 2006; Hewings & Hewings, 2002; Martı́nez, 2005). However, as pointed out by
Flowerdew (2001, p. 366), these studies have had little pedagogical impact: ‘‘not many of
the findings have been applied directly to pedagogy and tend to remain at the level of
implications.’’ The following two sections will be devoted to this important issue.

4. Corpora and EAP materials design

While materials designed to help students improve their academic writing skills are
legion (e.g., Bailey, 2006; Hamp-Lyons & Heasley, 2006), few are corpus-informed, relying
instead on materials writers’ perceptions of what good academic prose is or should be.
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Because of this lack of empirical support, many of these tools provide misleading
information and unsound advice, as comparisons of published EAP materials and actual
usage reveal (cf. Paltridge, 2002).
A careful examination of some of the major EAP resources reveals that the few that are
corpus-informed tend to be based on native corpora only. Thus, both Thurstun and
Candlin’s (1997) Exploring Academic English, which proposes a fully concordance-based
approach to EAP, and Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List, which has given rise to
several textbooks (e.g., Huntley, 2006; Schmitt & Schmitt, 2005), rely exclusively on data
from native corpora. Although such tools are very useful, they are arguably less well-suited
for non-native learners, despite Thurstun and Candlin’s (1998) claim that their own
materials are equally appropriate for native and non-native writers. This is because, as
mentioned above, learner writing is characterised by errors and infelicities, which are often
quite different from those found in native writing, even novice native writing. By relying
solely on native corpus data, EAP materials ignore these and thus fail to provide non-
native learners with the type of information that is arguably most vital to them. For
example, Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List does not include the 2000 most common
English words, with which non-native writers may still have considerable difficulties,
especially in cases where their use in academic writing differs from their habitual use
(see also Paquot, 2007).
What L2 learners need is EAP resource books addressing the specific problems they
encounter as non-native writers. By showing in context the types of errors learners make,
as well as the items they tend to underuse or overuse, learner corpora make such an
approach possible. Yet, hardly any materials writers up to now have taken up the
challenge of using learner corpus data. Milton’s (1998) WordPilot is one of the few
concrete pedagogical applications resulting from the analysis of learner writing and its
comparison with a reference corpus of native writing (see Tseng & Liou, 2006 for another
example). Starting from attested difficulties for Hong-Kong learners, WordPilot proposes
a series of remedial tasks and tools, such as proofreading exercises, an interactive grammar
or lists of words or expressions generally underused by learners. It should be emphasised,
however, that this program is a computer-assisted language learning application (this is the
case of Tseng & Liou, 2006 too) and that, once we move on to more traditional resources,
positions are more conservative and innovations, less common, with many editors ‘‘far
more comfortable with rehashes of what has gone before than with something different
(and refreshing)’’ (Harwood, 2005, p. 152).
There are several explanations for the relatively modest role that corpora have played in
EAP materials design. One of them is the difficulty of dealing with the fragmented picture
of academic writing that emerges from native corpus analyses. As already suggested in
Section 2, corpus-based research has demonstrated that ‘‘[t]he discourses of the academy
do not form an undifferentiated, unitary mass but a variety of subject-specific literacies’’
(Hyland, 2002, p. 389). Yet, as Hill (2005) points out, ‘‘in most academic institutions it is
simply not possible to provide all the students who need EAP support with the same level
of specificity.’’ For financial or logistic reasons, courses often have to focus on English for
general academic purposes, rather than English for specific academic purposes. One way to
get round this difficulty is to provide students with specially designed corpora of the
literature in their own field (or get them to collect such corpora) and encourage them to
scan concordance output to discover regularities of patterning, using the data-driven
learning technique advocated by Johns (1994). But while the benefit of such an approach
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has been underlined by some linguists (e.g., Bowker, 2003 in the field of ESP translation
training), others are more cautious and speak of ‘‘a danger of over-generalisation on the
part of learners’’ (Sripicharn, 2004, p. 243). In addition, learners need to be sufficiently
trained to use these corpora efficiently, which requires ‘‘an apprenticeship oriented toward
the development of ‘corpus research’ skills’’ (Kennedy & Miceli, 2001, p. 88), for which
teachers may not always have the time.
Learner corpora, too, reveal variability, which may be difficult to incorporate in EAP
materials. As we saw in Section 3, despite some shared problems, many of the difficulties
that non-native writers experience are L1-specific. This is true both for lexico-grammatical
errors, which may be due to transfer, but also for rhetorical infelicities, which may reflect
different conventions in the learner’s mother tongue (see e.g., Cargill & O’Connor (2006)
on the structural differences between Chinese and Western research articles). While it is
interesting from a descriptive point of view, however, L1-orientation is often unrealistic
from the perspective of publishers who, for obvious commercial reasons, often prefer
generic tools, which can be sold to students all over the world, to L1-specific tools, whose
market is usually more limited. As a consequence, EAP materials tend to focus on
problems, which are shared by many learner populations, leaving it to the teacher to tackle
L1-specific issues.
Finally, the creation of ‘‘corpus-based pedagogical enterprises’’ (Swales, 2002, p. 151) is
made even more complex by the fact that there is no direct link between corpus findings
and pedagogical relevance. As emphasised by Granger (forthcoming), whether character-
istics of learner language uncovered by corpus research are ‘‘selected for pedagogical
action or ignored depends on a variety of features, including learner needs, teaching
objectives and teachability.’’ Thus, some of the attested errors or infelicities may be more
crucial for advanced learners than for beginners. Another issue is that of the type of
language being targeted. Some learners may have native (or native-like) writing as a target,
while others may consider English as a Lingua Franca the ideal target. These factors,
combined with the discipline and L1 specificities mentioned above, result in a great
diversity, which may be quite difficult to reconcile in a holistic pedagogical approach.
While we have mainly focused on EAP resource books up to now, it should be noted
that learners have another tool at their disposal in order to improve their writing skills,
namely the monolingual learners’ dictionary (MLD). In the last decade, MLDs have taken
‘‘more proactive steps to help learners negotiate known areas of difficulty’’ (Rundell, 1999,
p. 47), to the point that they are today conceived of as comprehensive writing tools. They
now include productively oriented information in areas such as syntactic behaviour,
prevention of errors, phraseology and collocation. Some of the recent editions include
writing sections dealing with various aspects of academic prose, thus adopting a more
EAP-oriented approach (see, for example, the Longman Exams Dictionary (Major, 2006)
or the Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary of American English (Sinclair, 2007)).
Unlike in the EAP textbook industry, the use of corpora is well established in
lexicographical practice and MLDs have made good use of corpora of academic writing
(although the focus is on English for general academic purposes, for the same commercial
reasons as described above for resource books), as appears for example from the
integration of the Academic Word List into the Longman Exams Dictionary. However, the
corpora used are still largely native corpora, and learner corpus data have only been
integrated into error notes. Yet, we strongly believe that learner corpora can be exploited
to improve other aspects of the dictionary. In the next section, we report on such an
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enterprise, which resulted from the close collaboration between the Centre for English
Corpus Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain) and Macmillan Education.

5. An EAP collaborative project

In the second edition of the Macmillan Dictionary for Advanced Learners (MED2,
Rundell, 2007), learner corpus-based information is used not only to compile error notes
but also to guide the selection and content of grammar sections that focus on aspects of
English grammar, spelling and punctuation that are still problematic at an advanced level.
In addition, learner corpus data have informed an extended writing section focusing
on twelve rhetorical or organisational functions particularly prominent in academic
writing (1) adding information, (2) comparing and contrasting: describing similarities
and differences, (3) exemplification: introducing examples, (4) expressing cause and effect,
(5) expressing personal opinions, (6) expressing possibility and certainty, (7) introducing a
concession, (8) introducing topics and related ideas, (9) listing items, (10) reformulation:
paraphrasing or clarifying, (11) reporting and quoting, and (12) summarising and drawing
conclusions (Gilquin, Granger, & Paquot, 2007, pp. IW1–IW29). These writing sections
will be the focus of the last part of this article.

5.1. Data and methodology

While we are aware of the importance of discipline- and L1-specific features in EAP, we
also recognise the demands of the pedagogical market and the realities of the classroom,
and hence situate our research in a more general context, investigating features, which are
common across disciplines and learner populations. We selected EAP-specific words
according to the corpus-driven method described in Paquot (2007), a method that targets
discipline-independent words by extracting items which appear in a wide range of
academic texts. The list was then completed by words and phrases, which did not emerge
from our corpus analysis but are commonly mentioned in EAP materials. This selection
yielded a total of about 350 EAP markers.
A thorough analysis of these markers in a native expert corpus was first necessary as
detailed descriptions of their use are not widely available. In the context of the
development of the British edition of MED2, we took British native language as our target.
We used the 15-million word academic sub-corpus of the British National Corpus as a
comparable corpus.2 Not only does this corpus include samples of academic texts from a
wide range of disciplines (including humanities, arts, social science, medicine, and natural
science), but it is also one of the few available academic corpora that is large enough to
give access to lexical patterning and other phraseological phenomena. It represents
professional, or expert writing. Using expert writing as a norm against which to compare
learner writing is controversial. Researchers such as Lorenz (1999) criticise this type of
norm, arguing that it is ‘‘both unfair and descriptively inadequate’’ (p. 14). What these
researchers recommend, instead, is the use of a corpus of native-speaker student texts, that
is, novice writing. However, a novice norm may not always be desirable, especially in the
context of pedagogical applications. As Leech (1998, p. xix) puts it, ‘‘[n]ative-speaking
students do not necessarily provide models that everyone would want to imitate.’’ The
2
For more information on the British National Corpus, see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk.
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question of the norm can be settled by taking into account the aim of the comparison, as
Ädel (2006, pp. 206–207) does:
On the one hand, it can be argued that in order to evaluate foreign learner writing by
students justly, we need to use native-speaker writing that is also produced by
students for comparison. On the other hand, it can also be argued that professional
writing represents the norm that advanced foreign learner writers try to reach and
their teachers try to promote. In this respect, a useful corpus for comparison is one
which offers a collection of what Bazerman (1994, p. 131) calls ‘expert performances’.
Since the aim of MED2 is to help learners improve their writing skills, a professional
control corpus such as the BNC is arguably preferable to a non-professional corpus.
The learner corpus that was used within the frame of the MED2 project is the
International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot,
forthcoming), which now totals 3.5 million words and includes 6085 essays written by
learners from 16 mother tongue backgrounds belonging to different language families (e.g.,
French, Chinese, Norwegian, and Turkish). Each of the 6085 essays is accompanied by
over 20 learner and task variables (see Section 3), all of which have been stored in a
database and can be used by researchers as queries to compile sub-corpora that match
certain criteria. For the purposes of this project, 16 sub-corpora were compiled on the basis
of one learner variable, i.e. the mother tongue variable, and three task variables, i.e., all
texts are untimed argumentative essays potentially written with the help of reference tools.
The method used is based on CIA as described in Section 3. Native and learner data
were compared with highlight distinctive features in learners’ use of lexico-grammatical
and discourse patterns. A major advantage of corpus-based research is that it allows
researchers not only to check how lexical items are used in naturally occurring data, but
also to highlight linguistic features, and more particularly, phraseological patterns that are
used by EFL learners but which are not (or very rarely) found in native professional
writing (cf. De Cock, 2003). Learner corpora were then compared with each other so as to
distinguish between linguistic features found in the writing of learners from a wide range of
mother tongue backgrounds and those found exclusively in the writing of one or two
learner populations. Only linguistic features shared by at least half of the learner
populations under study are discussed in the writing sections. In addition, we used spoken
data, extracted from the spoken component of the BNC, to situate learner writing against
both academic prose and speech and to assess EFL learners’ awareness of register
differences.

5.2. EAP writing functions

Analysing these learner corpus data and comparing them with data from native corpora
has highlighted a number of problems which non-native learners experience when writing
academic essays. These include problems of frequency, register, positioning, semantics,
and phraseology. In what follows, we illustrate each of these problems in turn. Then, we
show how these problems have been dealt with in MED2.
Learner writing often exhibits patterns of frequency different from those found in native
writing. Thus, while in native English, for instance is much less common than for example
(2410 vs. 9233 hits in the academic component of the BNC), in learner English it is used
almost as frequently as for example, which results in a massive overuse of the expression.
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For example too tends to be overused by learners. This is likely to be related to their
underuse of a whole range of alternative expressions which can be used for exemplification,
such as X is an example of Y or an example of Y is X, illustrated by (1) and (2):

(1) Self-regulation is an example of what we earlier called ‘‘corporatism’’ (BNC EBM 526).
(2) An example of a treaty, which apparently gave procedural rights to individuals, is the
Anglo-Irish Agreement on Northern Ireland (BNC EF3 1531).

Because learners, as a rule, have a limited repertoire of expressions at their disposal to

fulfil a particular rhetorical function, they tend to rely on a few items only, which they use
over and over again, to the detriment of other, perhaps less salient expressions (see Paquot
(in press) on the function of exemplification in learner writing).
Problems of register confusion also regularly arise among non-native writers.
Particularly striking is learners’ tendency to use expressions, which are more typical of
speech than of writing. This is visible, for example, in their overuse of adverbs expressing a
high degree of certainty, such as really, of course or absolutely, which are characteristic of
speech rather than writing (cf. Fig. 1). By contrast, hedging adverbs (e.g., apparently,
possibly, presumably), which are common in academic writing, occur much less frequently
in learners’ essays.
Several studies have underlined learners’ preference for the sentence—initial position of
connectors (cf. Granger & Tyson, 1996 for French-speaking learners and Field & Yip,
1992 for Cantonese learners). To give but one example, learners tend to use however at the
beginning of the sentence, as in (3), whereas in native writing, it is more often found inside
the sentence, cf. (4). Our analyses show that, in the case of however at least, this tendency is
common to learners from a large number of mother tongue backgrounds, which points to
a universal feature of interlanguage.

(3) However, it is extremely difficult to get them away from the fast food corner
(ICLE-GE).
(4) There is, however, another way in which a useful advance might be made (BNC A1A
1491).

Fig. 1. Relative frequency of really, of course and absolutely in native academic writing, non-native academic
writing and speech (Gilquin et al., 2007, p. IW17).
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G. Gilquin et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6 (2007) 319–335 329

A word such as though, by contrast, is often used by learners as an adverb in sentence-

final position, e.g., (5). While this use does occur in native academic writing, it is more
typical of speech. In writing, native speakers favour the conjunctive use of though, mostly
found in the middle of the sentence, as exemplified in (6).

(5) There is no doubt about astrology being important in today’s society, though
(ICLE-SW).
(6) We do not know her name, though it is unlikely that the sculptor did not have a model
(BNC A04 1465).

The numerous phenomena of over- and underuse should not hide the fact that items are
also often misused by learners. The incorrect use of on the contrary, for example, brought
to light by researchers like Crewe (1990) or Lake (2004), is confirmed by our corpus data
and appears to be valid across several L1s. Sentence (7) is representative of the way on the
contrary is usually used in ICLE. While it normally expresses a direct denial of what has
been asserted before, meaning that the opposite is true, learners tend to use it simply to
describe differences, as a synonym of by contrast or on the other hand.

(7) Some of us overuse this trait, some; on the contrary, use it very seldom (ICLE-PO).

Finally, phraseology also appears to be a major stumbling block for learners. To take
the example of the word conclusion, our study indicates that learners often use it in the
(unidiomatic) expression as a conclusion, illustrated in (8). This expression is very rare
among native writers, who prefer in conclusion, cf. (9).3

(8) As a conclusion I would like to say that imagination will never die simply because all the
adults are big children who love everything fairy and unreal and who never forget
about tales and miracles existing in the world (ICLE-RU).
(9) In conclusion the challenges posed by an ageing population need radical rethinking and
immense cultural changes in attitudes (BNC HXT 545).

Another difference, which also emerges from the comparison of (8) and (9), is that in
learner writing in conclusion or as a conclusion are often followed by an expression
including the personal pronoun I, cf. I would like to say in (8), which is hardly ever the case
in native writing.
The writing sections in MED2, besides showing how several important rhetorical
functions are expressed in native academic writing, specifically address the five types of
problems discussed above. Our treatment of these problems is mainly explicit (see Rundell
(1999) on the distinction between explicit and implicit treatment of learner corpus-based
information), in that we draw learners’ attention to error-prone items and we provide them
with negative feedback in the form of ‘‘Be careful!’’ notes and ‘‘Get it right’’ boxes.
Numerous authentic examples are provided to illustrate all the points we make. Problems
of frequency, register confusion and atypical positioning are dealt with by means of graphs
3
Interestingly, Mukherjee and Rohrbach (2006) make the same remark about German-speaking learners, but
note that, in their data, as a conclusion only appears at a later stage in the language acquisition process, which
suggests that phraseological problems may particularly affect more advanced learners.
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330 G. Gilquin et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6 (2007) 319–335

Fig. 2. ‘‘Be careful!’’ note for exemplification (Gilquin et al., 2007, p. IW10).

Fig. 3. ‘‘Get it right’’ box for on the contrary (Gilquin et al., 2007, p. IW9).

like the one in Fig. 1 above. Such graphs help the reader visualise the differences between
learners’ behaviour and that of native writers. In addition, in cases where learners tend to
use the same few items over and over again, we present them with alternative ways of
expressing the function, thus giving them a chance to widen their lexical repertoire. Fig. 2
shows a ‘‘Be careful!’’ note, which warns the reader against the excessive use of for
example, for instance and e.g., to express the function of exemplification. It is followed
by a series of expressions, which though common in native academic writing, are neglected
by learners.
Typical semantic errors are illustrated in ‘‘Get it right’’ boxes, such as the one in Fig. 3
for on the contrary. These boxes start with an authentic learner error and explain why a
particular item is not appropriate in a given context and how it can be corrected. They also
give a clear description of what the item means and how it should be used.
Finally, unidiomatic collocations recurring in learner writing are highlighted (e.g.,
according to me, Gilquin et al., 2007, p. IW15) and some of the most common collocates of
certain words are offered in special boxes, thus combining an explicit and implicit
approach. In Fig. 4, some typical adjectives and verbs used with the word conclusion are
listed and examples are provided.
It should be emphasised that the information found in the writing sections may be
helpful for novice native writers, whose writing presents some of the problems displayed by
non-native writing. Thus, a study of the LOCNESS corpus, a corpus of native student
essays (see Granger, 1996), reveals a number of shared problems, such as the semantic
misuse of i.e. or the lack of register-awareness, with an overuse of speech-like lexical items
like maybe, so, really, PRO is why, I think and first of all (see Gilquin & Paquot, 2006).
However, the sections were written with the non-native writer in mind, and many of the
features described are learner-specific. The overuse of for instance or the erroneous use of
the expression as a conclusion, for example, are limited to non-native students. Other
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G. Gilquin et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6 (2007) 319–335 331

Fig. 4. ‘‘Collocation’’ box for conclusion (Gilquin et al., 2007, p. IW29).

Fig. 5. Relative frequency of maybe in native expert writing, native novice writing, non-native writing and speech.

learner-specific features include the overuse of items such as I would like/want/am going to
talk about, certainly, to my mind, from my point of view, as far as I am concerned; the
semantic misuse of on the other side, as (in lieu of such as); the erroneous use of according to
me; and lexico-grammatical errors such as *a same, possibility *to, despite *of or discuss
*about. Interestingly, in a number of cases, the data also reveal a continuum between
expert writing, novice writing and learner writing, as illustrated in Fig. 5 for maybe.

6. Conclusion

The fast-growing literature on corpus-based EAP is a clear indication that corpora are
beginning to gain a strong foothold in the field. This article has proposed that the hitherto
largely native speaker orientation of these studies can usefully be complemented with an
L2 perspective derived from the careful analysis of learner corpora. Although this two-
pronged approach was advocated by scholars as far back as the early 1990s, it has
remained relatively marginal, failing to have a major impact on EAP materials design.
Our investigation of rhetorical functions has shown that the use of learner corpus data,
and their systematic comparison with native corpora, can bring to light a wide range of
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332 G. Gilquin et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6 (2007) 319–335

learner-specific patterns, not limited to grammatical or lexical errors, but also including
clumsy wording, over-reliance on a limited set of linguistic items and under-representation
of a wide range of typical EAP writing patterns. While we have shown here how these
findings can be integrated into a learner’s dictionary, it is our belief that other writing
resources, such as textbooks or electronic writing aids, can equally benefit from the use of
learner corpus data.
Finally, our study has also provided some insight into the relation between novice
writing and non-native writing. Of the three categories of difficulties identified by
Flowerdew (see Section 3), only the first—lexico-grammatical patterning—is exclusive to
L2 learners; the other two—pragmatic appropriacy and discourse patterns—display only
partial overlap. This is an important and drastically under-researched area, which should
figure prominently on the EAP agenda.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Communauté franc- aise de Belgique, which
funded this research within the framework of the ‘‘Action de recherche concertée’’ project
entitled ‘‘Foreign Language Learning: Phraseology and Discourse’’ (No. 03/08-301).
Gaëtanelle Gilquin also acknowledges the support of the Belgian National Fund for
Scientific Research (FNRS).

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Gaëtanelle Gilquin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (Université catholique
de Louvain, Belgium) and a fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). Her research
interests include the integration of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, and how this integration can be
applied for pedagogical purposes.

Sylviane Granger is Professor of English Language and Linguistics and Director of the Centre for English Corpus
Linguistics at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. In 1990, she launched the International Corpus of
Learner English project, which has grown to contain learner writing by learners of English from 19 different
mother tongue backgrounds and is the result of collaboration from a large number of universities internationally.

Magali Paquot is a researcher at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain,
Belgium). In her doctoral thesis, she analyses the phraseology of EAP vocabulary in native professional and
student writing and compares findings with the way this sub-technical vocabulary is used in learner corpora.