A corpus-based investigation of the language of chemistry and physics textbooks and its implications for English for reading

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Danilo Duarte Costa
• Orientador(a): Deise Prina Dutra
• Banca de defesa: Randi Reppen, Valdênia de Carvalho e Almeida, Leonardo Pereira Nunes, Luciana de Oliveira Silva
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Linguísticos
• Departamento: FALE - FACULDADE DE LETRAS
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Corpus linguistics; English for specific purposes; Textbook language; Chemistry textbooks; Physics textbooks
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/33642

This is a descriptive study that investigates lexical and grammatical features of the language found in chemistry and physics textbooks used in higher education. Our ultimate goal is to map out common patters in this register so as to inform teachers and materials developers who are interested in the teaching of English for Specific Purposes; more specifically, English for Reading in the context of higher education science/engineering courses. For this reason, we also created sample activities to illustrate possible applications of our findings. Most frequently, books aimed at teaching English for Reading (in Brazil, commonly referred to as Inglês Instrumental) make use of texts taken from newspapers and magazines as a means of input. Hence, in order to carry out our investigation, a corpus of news texts taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) is compared with two other corpora, namely TB-Chem (Corpus of Chemistry Textbooks) and TB-Phy (Corpus of Physics Textbooks), that were compiled following strict methodological procedures based on the concepts of representativeness (Biber, 1993) and balance (McEnery, Xiao, Tono, 2006). The three corpora contain approximately 500 thousand tokens each, and comparisons are made within and across corpora. Results show that lexical, grammatical and rhetorical patters differ considerably between chemistry and physics on one side, and news on the other. For instance, the most common lexical items in chemistry and physics are dramatically different from those found in news. In addition, n-grams (sequences of words that commonly co-occur) present similar patterns in chemistry and physics textbooks, which contrast to those found in news. As regards verb tense/aspect, the present simple is preferred in chemistry and physics textbooks, while news presents a higher number of occurrences of the past simple. Among all other tense/aspect markers (e.g. present perfect, past progressive) news shows higher frequencies and different discourse functions than do TB-Chem and TB-Phy. Finally, concerning phrasal grammatical complexity, in chemistry and physics, most attributive adjectives modifying nouns were found to belong to the category of classifiers, whereas in news these adjectives are more evenly distributed in the categories of classifiers and descriptors. As for nouns being modified by other nouns, we have found that the number and types of nouns occupying the N1 and N2 slots in chemistry and physics sharply contrast to those found in news. These findings show that other sources of input rather than newspapers/magazines articles may better suit pedagogical materials aimed at the teaching of English for Reading in discipline-specific contexts.