ABSTRACT
Since English remains the primary language of science and research across theglobe, many academics are required to produce research in a language that is nottheir own. This research has been motivated by the difficulties this presents for the post-graduate students at the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU). The mainaim of the study is to construct a comprehensive pedagogic corpus for such students,and to incorporate it into an advanced academic thesis writing course. To this end, alearner abstract corpus (LAC) and a target abstract corpus (TAC) were compiledrespectively from work produced by post-graduate students at EMU, and fromabstracts written by post-graduate students in English speaking countries. Bothquantitative and qualitative methods were utilized to analyse the corpora. Thecomparison of the corpora exhibited extensive use of higher frequency vocabulary, atendency to repeat similar items, and recurrent inadequacy in using appropriatecollocations and lexico-grammatical patterns in the LAC. The work in the TAC,however, demonstrated the use of a wider range of lower frequency words, as wellas a more varied lexico-grammatical utilization of these items. Accordingly, a pedagogic corpus was constructed. This corpus includes the Academic AbstractCorpus (AAC) Bank, which offers alternative lexico-grammatical patterns for fulfilling the required generic moves and sub-moves in abstract and thesis writing;the TAC Wordlist of 165 key words for thesis writing; the web concordances of theLAC and the TAC; and a variety of teacher-led data driven and learner-led discoverytasks as well as other diverse academic writing resources. The corpus-informedcourse is mounted on Moodle, a virtual learning platform founded on socialconstructivist principles. The study produced major conclusions regarding corpora,iii
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