Corpus Approaches to Issues in the Acquisition of L2 English Academic Writing

With the increased availability of many low cost and freely accessible tools that can now be used to analyze large collections of text in (semi)automated ways, corpus approaches to linguistic inquiry have seen a sharp rise in popularity over the last 20 years. This increased attention, combined with eased data collection, has led to a wide range of studies making use of corpus approaches to better understand various genres and registers of linguistic output as a way of informing second language acquisition pedagogy and theory. In this paper, two particular areas of research that have benefited from the increased attention provided by corpus approaches to linguistic inquiry are discussed: formulaic sequences and first language related production tendencies. These two areas are used to reveal important pedagogical implications resulting from recent research applying corpus-driven lexical analyses of second language English academic writing.