Abstract
Academic English has been recognized as a distinct genre in the English discourse community with its unique and conventional text structure. Although many studies have been conducted to contribute to our understanding of the textual and phrasal aspects of various academic genres, few have been transformed into actual teaching practice in particular for EFL graduate students. The purpose of the study is to apply the results of textual analysis one step further for developing relevant online course content in explicitly teaching abstract writing in the applied linguistics discipline.By conducting text analysis and comparison on two corpora of 50 published journal research articles and 50 non-native conference paper abstracts, patterns and problems such as functional moves in organization, word use of patterns and phraseology were located. Text analysis results revealed that four potential problems in the non-native corpus concerning functional moves were found: Inverted move sequence, missing of obligatory moves, disproportional abstracts, and outlining information in one move. Moreover, with the help of computer programs, frequently used phraseology and collocations were found and categorized according to their functional moves for the purpose of presenting the information to learners in a systematic way. Next, a review of learning and teaching principles on L2 academic writing as well as existing websites designed for teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) was conducted in order to strengthen the theoretical and practical aspects of our material development. Two Natural Language Processing tools—a web-based concordancer CARE (Concordance of Academic wRitten English)—using the EAP corpus, and a peer-editing tool POWER (Peer Online Writing and Editing Room) were also incorporated into the online EAP teaching environment based on the MOODLE platform. Combining these three elements together the instructional design and development of online material development were then made complete.Formative evaluation of the abstract online unit was conducted at three public universities in northern Taiwan. 35 first-year graduate students were given two to three hours to finish the online materials. A 48-item evaluation questionnaire, including open-ended questions, were used to elicit information about students’ background information, the usefulness of online materials, overall design of the abstract online unit, and the participants’ attitudes toward using the new tools. From the results of the questionnaire, students’ different experiences and needs in writing academic articles were reported. Among the components of the online materials, students gave the highest credits to “Lessons” (hypertextual lecture notes) followed by “Web Resources” and “Activities”. They also expressed their willingness of revisiting the unit when necessary. Although students indicated little difficulty in using the computer tools and the platforms in the unit, their attitudes toward the computer tools were only moderately positive. Finally, six modifications of the abstract learning unit were made according to student feedback from the questionnaire. This study has demonstrated the feasibility of linking research results to material development. Two implications are drawn from the current study. First, language teachers can make use of the platform and computer tools employed in this study to assist their teaching of EAP writing, especially in aspects such as material implementation, peer review, and promotion of inductive learning. Second, by studying and analyzing the learner corpus, researchers might identify some common patterns of Taiwanese learners’ writing which may deserve teachers’ instructional efforts.Further research in testing the usefulness of this online unit on learners will undoubtedly help to refine this sample unit. In addition, researchers in the future might want to expand the size of their collected reference corpus so as to not only have better representative results of an analysis but also present more varieties of lexical choices to the target learners. Lastly, as e-learning is becoming a trend in foreign language learning, how to effectively combine e-learning with traditional classroom instruction for optimal learning effect might deserve researchers’ attention in the future.