Innovation in Language Learning

Academic Writing and Corpus Linguistics are considered to be major research domains with a high potential for research in applied linguistics and teacher training in higher education. A two-year research project, conducted at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland, has resulted in the creation of an interactive Academic Writing tool, Thesis Writer, which exploits the synergy between these two areas. In order to offer students instant formulation support during thesis writing, two academic-writing corpora have been compiled: TESEC-DE (German) and TESEC-EN (English). The linguistic support tools for thesis proposal writing are: corpus free search and a phrase bank. Academic phrases are distributed according to the section of the thesis students are editing at the time of the online writing process, e.g. Method. In this paper, we will investigate on the actual use of academic phrases and academic vocabulary in students’ thesis proposals written in German in the field of Economics. The corpus analysis will include wordlists and concordances extracted from two corpus databases: the reference corpus TESEC-DE and the learner corpus PropCor-DE (Proposal Corpus in German). We will also use a plagiarism detection software program (WCopyfind) to check the degree of phrase “borrowing” from the in-tool corpus in students proposals. Results (appropriate use of academic phraseology, tendency towards routinisation of the proposal outline writing, improved proposal writing process) indicate that academic writing tools are useful instruments for both university students and teachers.