A Learner Corpus Driven Approach to Novice Turkish Authors' EAP Use Tendencies

Abstract

It has been accepted that foreign language-speaker authors experience linguistic challenges when writing in English for academic purposes (EAP) genre. Novice Turkish writers also experience linguistic insecurities in the field of EAP. Yet, oftentimes, they may not find sufficient personal and institutional support in solving EAP related linguistic difficulties, which plays a decisive role in the rejection of their contribution in high profile English language journals. To occupy this niche, this study aims to examine the linguistic difficulties experienced by Turkish-speaking novice writers through a corpus-driven approach. Some 158 articles exploring learner errors in three main difficulty areas in EAP writing - collocational patterning, pragmatic appropriacy, and discourse features - were analyzed to highlight several problems which 'non-native' learners experience when writing academic articles. The literature review analysis has revealed some 68 linguistic markers that pose a special challenge to novice writers. These constructs are problematic due to both universal interlanguage and also Turkish learners' L1 backgrounds. The learner corpus (TICLE) occurrences of the features being studied were compared with the native corpus (COCA) data to present examples of the prevalent uses of these constructs. Linguistic difficulties learners experience when writing academic articles were grouped under four main headings. These four main areas are (1) excessive use of some linguistic features or little or no use of typical linguistic features of EAP, (2) misuse of some syntactic elements and punctuation errors, (3) incorrect use and sequencing of words, and (4) using unidiomatic phraseologies because of transferring the word patterns specific to Turkish to English. The findings of the study are expected to help Turkish academics improve their writing. In the last section of the article, some databases are introduced to help Turkish writers develop their academic English writing autonomously.