Abstrakt
The paper explores English L2 academic texts written by Czech university students in comparison with English L1 novice and expert writing, trying to find out to what extent the phraseological differences between them are due to what may be termed the 'academic' challenge, i.e. the lack of experience on the part of novice academic writers, and to the 'linguistic' challenge, i.e. not being native English writers. The study combines contrastive analysis and learner corpus research to explore recurrent multi-word patterns comprising the word-form it, such as it is obvious, even though it, when it comes to. 3-word it-grams over/underused significantly by both groups of novice writers or by English L2 writers in comparison with L1 expert writers (i.e. the norm) were identified and their functions explored in detail.
We assume that patterns over/underused by both groups of apprentice academic writers signal the impact of the 'academic' challenge (e.g. stylistic missteps - it is interesting to note..., underuse of impersonal patterns - it could/might be...). The impact of the 'linguistic' challenge, on the other hand, can be seen where the patterns used by Czech students differ from those used by both groups of English L1 writers (e.g. the expression of stance - it is true that..., underuse of complex information packaging structures).
While English L2 novice academic writers have to face both types of challenge, the lack of academic expertise seems to be a more prominent factor at this level of proficiency.