Using nouns to report : a corpus-based study of the use of reporting nouns by French-speaking EFL learners in discipline-specific texts
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- To build convincing arguments in their assignments for their university courses, students, as expert writers in their research articles, need to situate their research or ideas among what has already been published on the topic they are dealing with. Being able to appropriately quote and report other authors’ claims or their own ideas or findings is therefore one of the key competences university students are trained and required to develop and master at university. This corpus-based study aimed to investigate the use of nouns that could be used to quote or report by French-speaking EFL learners in their discipline-specific texts. Drawing on Granger’s (2015) reappraised “Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis” method, non-native learners’ writing was compared to both native novice writers’ writing and expert writers’ writing. This trilateral comparison ultimately proved to be helpful in determining which variables might have an influence on the lexical choices of non-native novice writers when reporting or quoting. The reliance on verbs (typical of speech) rather than nouns (typical of academic writing) by both non-native and native novice writers first suggested that developmental factors might have a role to play in the lexical choices of non-native writers to report. When using nouns, L2 writers were then found to use semantically vague nouns rather than semantically-specialized nouns. Finally, factors such as the influence of the mother tongue or the limited lexical repertoire of L2 writers were also identified as factors that could influence their choice of lexical devices to report. A tool that non-native writers could use to help them vary the type of ‘reporting’ lexical devices in their assignment was also presented in this study.