The lecture focuses on the phraseology of academic written English. The approach combines corpus-informed contrastive analysis and learner corpus research.
It compares texts written by two groups of novice academic writers - L1 English university students and advanced Czech learners. The analysis relies on two corpora of academic student writing; an additional corpus compiled from papers published in English academic journals serves as a yardstick against which the students' essays are compared.
The corpus-driven approach takes frequency lists, keywords and lexical bundles as its starting points to reveal areas in which phraseology distinguishes native speakers of English from L2 learners on the one hand, and novice writers (whether L1 or L2) from experienced academic writers on the other.