Compiling a Written Corpus of English as an Academic Lingua Franca: Medical Research Articles of Turkish Academics

Abstract

English as lingua franca (ELF) is a “world language whose speakers communicate mainly with other NNSs, often from different L1s than their own” (Jenkins, 2006, p.140). However, given the importance of ELF in the world of publication, surprisingly, empirical research on the linguistic description of ELF has been thin. Available studies are confined to audio-recordings as spoken language and there are not any written ELF corpora. Moreover, there is an urgent need to raise awareness of ELF in mainstream English classrooms. This study aims to build a self-compiled corpus of Turkish academics’ empirical research articles from the field of medicine to investigate the salient features of ELF lexico-grammar. Specifically, the use of ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’ as variants (not errors) were examined. 20 medical research articles were collected containing approximately 59,648 words. Empirical data was analysed manually to explore the potential salient features of ELF lexico-grammar (see Cogo & Dewey, 2006; Seidlhofer, 2004). It is notable that unlike Seidlhofer’s (2004) corpus, which is a computer-based corpus of audio recordings and transcriptions of spoken ELF interactions, this study concentrates on written corpus in the form of medical research articles. The initial findings, with regard to the target grammar-related aspects, revealed that the omission of the definite article ‘the’ had the highest frequency at 2.1% (1,246 occurrences) and inserting the definite article the when redundant amounted to 0.36% (219 occurrences). It was also observed that omissions of indefinite articles ‘a/an’ were 0.26% (153 occurrences). The findings suggest that the usage of ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’ tended to be unproblematic, and did not lead to a breakdown in communication, which could be ELF variants as regular tendencies. Discourse samples are provided from the corpus and pedagogical implications are discussed in light of literature.

Keywords

• ELF
• English for specific purposes
• Corpus
• Medical research article

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