Madalina Chitez

West University of Timisoara · Department of Modern Languages and Literature

This chapter explores the ability of digital technologies to provide language support for writers. With such ability, technologies directly intervene into the productive act of language creation, which we refer to by the traditional term formulation . Formulation here is defined as the kind of thinking that happens when a writer tries to linearize...

The chapter aims at providing an overview of the modalities in which linguistic corpora have been integrated in writing related approaches and technologies. The history of corpus linguistics is almost one century old, demonstrating a wide range of applications and interdisciplinary research potential. In this study, two main directions have been id...

This paper presents the methodology and data used for the automatic extraction of the Romanian Academic Word List (Ro-AWL). Academic Word Lists are useful in both L2 and L1 teaching contexts. For the Romanian language, no such resource exists so far. Ro-AWL has been generated by combining methods from corpus and computational linguistics with L2 ac...

In Romania, the attraction of young schoolchildren to literature is doubtlessly deficient in many ways: the temptation of the digital environment as a recreational refuge and the lack of reading practice, primarily due to inappropriate selection criteria of materials contribute to increased rates of functional illiteracy and school dropout, which a...

Learner corpora of written texts from academic writing assignments provide a practical resource for students, particularly in fostering academic writing skills. One such corpus is the newly available ROGER (Corpus of Romanian Academic Genres), a bilingual comparable corpus containing learner discipline-specific academic writing data in Romanian nat...

This volume is addressed to a wide range of scholars interested in the use of digital tools and methods in the humanities. Readers can find examples of new instruments and workflows which attest successful applications of the digital humanities techniques to some (traditional) problems in the scholarship of several disciplines. In addition, the foc...

Internationalisation is a desired goal for contemporary universities, which are increasingly using concepts like cultural diversity or globalism as selling points to attract students. However, these concepts are not always clearly defined in terms of underlying values and lived experience. We used a corpus linguistics approach to extract university...

In Romania, the issue of readability in conjunction with student writing has gone largely unexplored. As increasing attention is being paid to developing frameworks for analysing academic writing genres in the entire Central and Eastern European area, quantitative and qualitative studies that address the multifaceted nature of student writing are m...

Since most of the academic articles relevant for many disciplines are to be found in English, it is important to understand the linguistic challenges of academic publishing in English L2 in contrast with the mother tongue academic writing specifics. The present paper explores a series of challenges faced in the attempt to build expert corpora for a...

In the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), as in any other type of interlanguage, phraseology contributes significantly to successful academic writing (Biber and Barbieri 2007). For particular learner varieties, such as Romanian English, few studies have examined formulaic sequences (Hyland 2008), mainly focusing on lexico-grammatical pat...

The aim of this chapter is to determine whether corpora can be used to teach specialized academic language in a similar way for L1 and L2 target groups. We conducted an experimental study where we compare the results of the same corpus teaching intervention in L1 (Romanian) and L2 (English for Specific Academic Purposes) courses at the West Univers...

This study undertakes an analytical perspective upon the dynamics of writing practices in the Romanian educational system, as they can be observed in transitioning from the secondary to the HE system. The paper highlights the gaps between the two learning models starting from the analysis of writing, a vital instrument widely used in the Romanian t...

Diving into digital education seems to be the reality in recent times. Universities and humanities departments in particular have willingly embraced technology-rich teaching methods for a long time now [1]. Nevertheless the general development is towards the implementation of basic digital literacy approaches rather than towards creating new discip...

In Romania, writing is the primary means of assessing student knowledge ever since the adoption of the Bologna Process. Often, students are expected to have learned academic, as well as professional writing, in high school, or to learn it intuitively at university. Previous studies indicate that, in Romania, the genres learned in high school only s...

The modern university has the potential to turn into a nexus of digital embracement and innovation, thus responding to both strategic planning for higher education and societal demands. Priorities in digitalisation strategies (White Paper ‘Bologna Digital 2020’, Rampelt et al. 2019) for higher education institutions (HEIs) are actively promoted, an...

This study aims to analyse the effects of a digitally enhanced teaching strategy in an ESP course. The intervention method consists of guided corpus linguistics exercises which are progressively introduced to improve the students’ academic writing. We collected data from various task-based corpus processing, consultation and analysis stages, each o...

Student translator training has benefited greatly from the latest developments in digital research methods, mostly in the framework of corpus-based translation studies (CBTS). In the present paper, we will highlight the general usefulness of corpus-based processing tools (wordlists and concordancers) in assessing translation patterns emerging in th...

The theme selected for the 2019 EuroCALL conference held in Louvain-la-Neuve was ‘CALL and complexity’. As languages are known to be intrinsically and linguistically complex, as are the many determinants of learning (additional) languages, complexity is viewed as a challenge to be embraced collectively. The 2019 conference allowed us to pay tribute...

Launched with the Bologna Declaration of 1999, the Bologna Process aimed at bringing cooperation and policy coherence within a broader European context. However, even after 20 years of dialogue and implementing reforms, there are still disparities within the European Higher Education Area. Our paper focuses on the gap between Eastern European and W...

One of the challenges in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms is teaching writing genres, especially to students who come from fields that are taught in L1. This is presumably “not only because different languages seem to have different ways of organizing ideas and structuring arguments but because students’ prior writing experiences in t...

The practice of electronic feedback has become popular with both educators and students in the last decade. However, in the Romanian HE context, little is known about the impact that the digital technologies have on academic writing improvement processes, neither for beginner nor experienced writers. The present case study examines how a group of 1...

Recent research has recognized the benefits of using corpus methodologies (e.g. Nesi & Gardner, 2002) in surveying academic writing genres alongside more traditional methods such as interviews and questionnaires in order to capture both their textual and contextual features. In this paper, we draw on findings from a mixed-method research undertaken...

This book explores specific issues related to academic writing provision in the post-communist countries in Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. Although they have different cultures and writing traditions, these countries share common features in what regards the development of higher education and research and encounter challenges different from...

This chapter reports on the LIDHUM institutional partnership project between a Swiss university and three Eastern and Southeastern European partner universities. The aim of the project was to improve our understanding of the role of writing at the respective universities and introduce new ways of teaching and learning writing. This was accomplished...

Corpus-based academic writing studies have been increasingly used to verify hypotheses regarding processes of university writing and learning. In the Romanian context, research in the areas of academic writing and corpus linguistics has been relatively scarce. Academic writing in Romanian is not explicitly taught, whereas academic writing in Englis...

Academic writing in Central and Eastern Europe remains an under-explored area in both teaching and research. While in many Western countries universities have long acknowledged the importance of writing support and research-based teaching implementations, in Eastern and Central Europe student writing has merely been seen as a personal skill that is...

Much of the research dealing with digital technology in university education has emphasized its impact on students' engagement with academic studies. The use of digital content in applied linguistics also has a high didactic potential, considering that one of the defining features of this field is the connection it creates between linguistic observ...

The changes that have occurred in Romania in recent years have resulted in a dynamic and diverse landscape of academic genres in higher education, in which several traditions coexist: the French and German traditions which helped shape the Romanian educational system since the 19th century, the Soviet-inspired system that largely replaced them afte...

Genre-based corpus research has provided insight into the general rhetorical profiles, the structure and functions of genres in the disciplines. The ROGER project aims at using a mixed approach in which genre-based research and corpus-based interlanguage analyses are combined. Including the students’ mother tongue in the contrastive analyses will o...

In recent years, language teachers have started to use corpora for vocabulary lessons more frequently. In this contribution, we use an energy-related German language corpus (EnerGE), a part of the ZHAW multilingual energy corpus. Our intention is to exemplify the use of both corpus automatic analyses (i. e. text complexity index) and corpus-driven...

Die Förderung der sprachlich-kommunikativen Kompetenzen im allgemeinbildenden Unterricht (ABU) an Berufsfachschulen erfordert - aufgrund der verschiedenen Sprachbiographien und heterogenen sprachlichen Kompetenzen der Lernenden - nicht nur eine systematische Erfassung der demographischen, migrations-und sprachbiographischen Merkmale der Lernenden,...

How should we explore writing on a continent comprised of more than 50 countries and more than 50 major languages? How can we understand our national writing practices when each country is tied to its own traditions of higher education and follows its own set of teaching routines, examination procedures, career patterns and university structures? A...

Academic Writing and Corpus Linguistics are considered to be major research domains with a high potential for research in applied linguistics and teacher training in higher education. A two-year research project,

At European universities, writing is a traditional way of learning, assessment, and independent study, but it is handled in an implicit, tradition-based way that has only recently been contrasted with and supported by a more explicit writing pedagogy. Still, little systematic knowledge is available about the pedagogical approaches to writing, writi...

Phraseology has long been used in L2 teaching of academic writing, and corpus linguistics has played a major role in the compilation and assessment of academic phrases. However, there are only a few interactive academic writing tools in which corpus methodology is implemented in a real-time design to support formulation processes. In this paper, we...

The European Writing Survey (EUWRIT), both the student and faculty versions, reflects the need to systematically gather data on student writing in various institutional and disciplinary contexts. The final version of the survey (status January 2015) includes questions on: personal and demographic data, general questions on writing in the study prog...

Thesis Writer is a newly created online learning environment, supporting students in mastering the various organizational, cognitive, social and linguistic demands of thesis writing. Users of Thesis Writer are offered tutorials and organizational aids to anticipate, prepare, plan and write their theses. Conceptually, Thesis Writer has been designed...

The cumulative methodology of academic writing and corpus linguistics research has been significantly more rarely approached than the separate methodology of each of the two fields. In corpus linguistics, the computer-supported profile of the discipline is inherently achieved given the fact that databanks are compiled, processed and analysed with...

Aiming at exemplifying the methodology of learner corpus profiling, this book describes salient features of Romanian Learner English. As a starting point, the volume offers a comprehensive presentation of the Romanian-English contrastive studies. Another innovative aspect of the book refers to the use of the first Romanian Corpus of Learner English...

This paper presents a comparison of genre use at three Swiss universities from different language regions. The methodology is one of contrastive genre mapping in which we connect two lines of re-search usually seen as distinct approaches. The aim of the study is to find ways of comparing the writing cultures of different languages by collecting and...

The article sets out with the question of how writing cultures in a multilingual setting of 50 countries and even more languages like Europe can be studied. Each country formed its own system of higher education and looks back to its own lines of teaching traditions. In spite of attempts to “harmonize” higher education through what is called the “B...

The opening chapter of the volume, Madalina Chitez’s ‘Lexical frequency profile applications on learner corpora: a Romanian learner English explorative analysis’, draws on the exploratory analysis of the first Romanian Corpus of Learner English (RoCLE). Her research focuses on the identification of the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) applications r...

von Unterschieden in Texten an Sprachen liegt da-rin, dass die Variabilität von Textmerkmalen innerhalb einer Sprache in der Regel grösser ist, als die zwischen Sprachen. Hyland (2000) hat gezeigt, wie hoch die Variabilität von intertex-tuellen Praktiken allein innerhalb englischer Texte aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen ist. Für die meisten derzei...

The project reported in this paper follows the lines of contrastive writing research (for instance Kaplan 1966; Galtung 1981; Clyne 1987; Foster and Russell 2002; Siepman 2006) in which writing practices and genres are compared across countries or languages. In our research, however, we do not look at individual writing but at writing cultures and...

The paper draws on the exploratory analysis of the first Romanian corpus of Learner English, RoCLE which was compiled between 2007 and 2009 in collaboration with six Romanian Universities. The polysemic prepositions investigated have been selected on the basis of a comparative list in which items from a previous Error-Analysis study (Parlog & Popa...

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit didaktischen Genres und den mit ihnen verbundenen Schreibpraktiken in einem wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Studiengang (vgl. auch Rast in diesem Band). Ziel ist es, zu einem Verständnis davon zu kommen, wie man Genres und Schreibpraktiken im Kontext wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Studiengänge untersuchen und zu Aussagen ü...

The focus of the article is the dialectal-typological analysis of Perfect Simple/PS (Ro. ‘perfectul simplu’) in Romanian dialects, i.e. Bobiceşti/Olt/Wallachia and Almaş/Arad/Transylvania. Paralleled by the main literature-based characteristics of the tense, the data do not only emphasize the surprisingly preponderant distribution of PS in Transylv...