Helping Taiwanese Graduate Students Help Themselves: Applying Corpora to Industrial Management English as a Foreign Language Academic Reading and Writing

Abstract

Lack of knowledge in the conventional use of vocabulary and multiword patterns in one's respective field of expertise causes Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly “non-nativelike.” This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost second language readers and often have difficulty “picking up on” the regularly encountered language patterns found in scholarly texts. As one step in determining a solution to this problem, this article reports on a pilot implementation encouraging graduate Taiwanese students for whom English is a foreign language to use self-editing techniques in their own field-specific academic writing by use of a corpus tool. Classroom interviews, draft comparisons, and individual stimulated recall interviews showed a difference in acceptance and success after using the corpus tool (StringNet Navigator) as an aid to self-editing academic English writing. The corpus tool's functions, results of its use by industrial management graduate students for self-editing academic writing, and pedagogical implications are described.