2nd Edition

Academic Writing with Corpora A Resource Book for Data-Driven Learning

By Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe Copyright 2025
    226 Pages 141 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    226 Pages 141 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Academic Writing with Corpora offers an accessible guide to using corpora in academic writing successfully and productively. Addressing the challenges faced by EAP teachers when explaining to their students how to write 'naturally', this book places an emphasis on learning from expert and proficient writing.

    Revised and updated throughout, this book:

    • takes a highly practical approach, now with new tasks and the latest software features;

    • fosters autonomous learning by demonstrating how to solve everyday difficulties in word choice and grammar;

    • places a special emphasis on the use of corpora to explore rhetorical strategies;

    • introduces the reader to five corpus tools (SkELL, Lextutor, COCA, MICUSP and AntConc);

    • offers a new section on DIY corpora, including basic principles and a step-by-step guide to building a corpus, with an introduction to AntConc;

    • now includes a ‘Further Reading’ section for each chapter.

    This resource book is for teachers looking to introduce data-driven learning into the classroom without spending excessive time on researching corpora and preparing tasks. It is also for second-language academic writers – university students and researchers – who are motivated to improve their writing and to learn from proficient and expert writing in their area.

    List of Figures

    List of Tables

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction

     

    Chapter 1 Introduction to corpus tools

    Chapter 2 Introduction to AntConc. Building and using a do-it-yourself (DIY) corpus

    Chapter 3 Observing and using language patterns

    Chapter 4 Rhetorical and discourse features in general and subject-specific corpora

    Chapter 5 Writing research papers with corpora

     

    Answer key

    Glossary of corpus terms

    Index

    Biography

    Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe is an independent scholar who for many years taught English for academic purposes at the University of Huddersfield, UK, using corpus methods.