Reflecting upon our experiences of learning academic writing, we will introduce some useful resources which can help both native speakers and learners of English develop an academic tone and style indispensable to scholarly writing. The resources to be reviewed in this presentation include non-digital and digital materials such as phrasebanks and corpora.

1. Everybody is a Native
Speaker, Nobody is a
Native Writer!
Mehrasa Alizadeh
Parisa Mehran
Osaka University
Graduate School of Information Science
and Technology, Takemura Lab
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Back to School
April 23, 2016

2. “No one is a native speaker of writing” (Leki, 1992, p. 10).
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3. Our Personal Journey through
Academic Writing
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4. According to Dörnyei and
Taguchi (2010), the key
challenge in questionnaire
translation is to satisfy two
rather contradictory
conditions: (1) the
equivalence of the two
versions of the
questionnaire (i.e., both
versions should ask same
questions), and (2) the
naturalness of the
translation (i.e., translated
words and phrases should
be both frequent and
commonly used by
people).
According to Dörnyei and
Taguchi (2010), the primary
challenge in translating
surveys is to establish
construct equivalence—
that the linguistically
different forms of the
survey engage the same
constructs—and the
naturalness of
translation—that the
rendered survey items
consist of commonly used
vocabulary in the target
language.
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5. It is necessary to consult
external reviewers or to
ask an independent
translator to
backtranslate the
questionnaire from the
target into the source
language. When the two
versions correspond with
each other, this assures
that they are equivalent.
It is therefore highly
important to ascertain
the quality of translated
surveys by consulting
language experts with a
good command of
translation.
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6. Academic Phrasebank
http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/
It is organized according to the main sections of a research paper
or dissertation.
The items in the Academic Phrasebank are mostly content neutral
and generic in nature; therefore, using them does NOT constitute
plagiarism.
The resource was designed primarily for writers who are non-
native speakers of English. However, native speaker writers may
still find much of the material helpful. In fact, the majority of
users are native speakers of English.
The site was created by John Morley, a professor at the
University of Manchester.
It consists of 100 postgraduate dissertations completed at the
University of Manchester.
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7. BYU Corpora
By Mark Daviesa, a professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young
University
http://corpus.byu.edu/
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8. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
A freely available corpus, though registration is required
It is balanced by:
Genre: spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic texts
Year: 1990-2015
The interface for COCA allows for quite sophisticated searches,
but basic searching is rather straightforward
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9. Google as a Quick ‘n Dirty Corpus Tool
(Title adopted from Robb, 2003)
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10. Google-driven language learning
How EFL students can use Google to correct their “untreatable”
written errors (Geiller, 2014)
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11. Wildcard search:
The asterisk acts as a placeholder for a gap-fill, and
results in a range of potential responses.
For academic purposes, Google Scholar can be used.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/
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12. Google Custom Search Engine
https://cse.google.com/cse/
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13. Google Books Corpora
http://googlebooks.byu.edu/x.asp
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14. Springer Exemplar: Scientific Terms in Context
http://springerexemplar.com/index.aspx
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18. Software Tools
Freeware Corpus Analysis Toolkit
by Laurence Anthony, Waseda
University
http://www.laurenceanthony.net/s
oftware.html
AntConc
Adelaide Text Analysis Tool
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19. Japanese Corpora
• http://www.manythings.org/corpus/
• http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/
• https://chunagon.ninjal.ac.jp/
• https://hinoki-project.org/
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21. I write to live and I live to write.
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