Abstract - Academic article

This study investigates the influence of using corpus technology in L2 academic writing, the effects of this technolgy on language learning and approaches to L2 writing, and also, its individual experiences and contextual factors. It attempts to emphasize that the corpus approach not only can enhance learners’ awareness of lexico-grammatical patterning of texts, but also can foster inductive learning. The context was presented between students that come from a graduate-level advanced ESL academic writing course of the Dongguk University, Korea, but the researchers was focused in 6 cases, students from different nationalities, which four students were majoring in science-related fields (one in combined science and education); one was in education; and the other one in the humanities. The students received a course that was given by a veteran ESL professor; this course contained ten weeks, twice a week, and two and a half hour per day. After that process, the participants were interviewed approximately once every two weeks for an hour during the first quarter. Results did show that there are big differences between their fields of study; three of them just use the corpus for class writing assignments, while the others did not; another factor presented that the science majors students may have had less need for writing in their courses, and the three non-science majors students likely to require more writing and a wider variety of styles.

http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num2/yoon.pdf

How can I use the sentences reducing strategies?

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Schenker, in her article “Smart House”,Speak up 169, accounts in the future, thanks for technology, houses will be networked making people’s life easier and comfortable. Electronic devices will be connected to Internet and will have special chips to control housework, communications, shopping, bills or people social life. Disadvantages of having a networked house do not seem to be significant. People will just have to pay some extra dollars for the extra chips. Connection to Internet and the security to protect systems against pirating. Maintenance will not have to be afforded by people because service will repair themselves. The author concludes that the money spent by people will not mean much considering all the benefits of having a smart house.

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This study went through 1,600 marginal and comments written on 110 drafts of essays by 47 university ESL advanced students, considering pragmatic goals and linguistic features of comments. Drafts of individual essays were examined to observe the influence of the first draft commentary on the students’ revisions and asses the changes that were made in response to teacher’s feedback improved the essays. The author thinks that significant proportions of comments led to substantive student revision, and there were particular types of commentary were more helpful than others. The final results are suggestive of several important implications for L2 writing instruction and future studies on a vital neglected topic.