Abstract:
Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy, this article explores vocabulary as a supportive tool for this purpose. Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for content richness in foreign language writing. Sixty-six essays composed by 33 language learners preparing for two tests of English for General Academic Purposes, namely IELTS, and TOEFL, were investigated before and after receiving these concept-carrying lexical items. The study revealed that novice writers of academic essays could enhance the quality of essay content with the help of vocabularies which carry concepts and ideas.Retrospective interviews using stimulated recalls indicated that EFL writers had virtually no access to vocabularies needed for presenting most of concepts and believed that these lexical items would help them write better. So practical are these collocations for both making up content deficiency in academic writing and meanwhile assisting learners in broadening their topical knowledge scholarship that syllabus designers and EFL instructors can utilize them for higher pedagogical yields.
Machine summary:
Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for content richness in foreign language writing.
This scant attention has also been detected in writing teachers‟ discourse which suffers from a disproportionate share of ideational talk, by which teachers introduce concepts, ideas, and argument, compared with the dominant micro-episode linguistic talk dealing with vocabulary, grammar and other related features (Aghajanzadeh & Hemmati, 2014).
Using a reference corpus to assess the collocational value of L2 bigrams in a longitudinal survey, Bestgen and Granger (2014) indicated the important role phraseology plays in L2 writing development: the more usage of collgrams which combine lexis and grammar, the higher quality of text produced by ESL writers.
The exchange of thoughts and insights between studies on English language learning andteaching composition has caused many experts to accept the interdisciplinary natureof writing in which social, cultural, linguistic, and cognitive faculties are seriously involved (Leki, 2003).
Apart from vocabulary learning, they could broaden the world knowledge scope through DCCs. He and Shi (2012) argue that the prompt that need specific topical knowledge can be challenging for L2 writers in terms of quality and quantity of contents The interview cast light on the pressing need for these lexical bundles inasmuch as students expressed no reservation about their constructive implications for writing improvement in terms of content richness, organization, and wording length.
Upon learning vocabularies of specific community domain, students can raise their topical knowledge, which its role in foreign language writing appears crucial.