SciE-Lex report: Building up a Collocational Database to Assist the Production of Biomedical Texts in L2 English

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the building-up of SciE-Lex (http://www.ub.edu/grelic/eng/scielex2/scielex.html), a collocational database of non-specialized terms in biomedical English, which was primarily conceived as a response to the lack of reference tools accounting for the lexicogrammatical patterning associated with non-technical terms frequently used in the health science discourse. SciE-Lex thus serves the purpose of assisting L2 English writers from the health science discourse community in their production of biomedical texts in English. This collocational database is the result of a lexicographic project carried out by the GreLiC research group at the University of Barcelona, and as such it has undergone various developmental stages since its inception. In order to evaluate its adequacy as a writing tool addressed to the Spanish biomedical community and confirm the appropriateness of the combinatorial patterning and phraseological information included in each entry, a group of language experts were asked to assess the dictionary by stressing both its weaknesses and strengths. Their feedback has stressed the suitability of SciE-Lex as a lexicographic resource and yielded significant improvement of the tool. Last but not least, SciE-Lex has also been successfully tested with targeted users in a series of “Writing for publication” workshops held at the University of Barcelona, and taught by the author, the results of which have corroborated the usefulness of this lexical database to enhance Spanish users’ biomedical English published writing.