ACCESS TO THE DISCOURSE COMMUNITY OF BIOLOGISTS IN ALGERIA: IMPROVEMENT IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY USING A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

This thesis is a pedagogically-motivated study. It deals with the teaching of English (E.S.P) at university level, and more particularly English for Science and Technology (E.S.T). The present study was conducted at the Department of Biology of the University of Oran. It aims to investigate the context in which the language course takes place, and to explore the scientific discourse used by this community using a corpus-based approach. An investigation of the discourse community under study is explored through the use of questionnaires. The data were analysed both for explicit information and implicit perspectives. Based on the evidence gathered, this research offers useful implications to English language teaching, focusing mainly on the reading skill, and proposes a task-based teaching to training programmes for effective participation of new members in the discourse community. A detailed analysis (based mainly on ‘collocation’ and ‘colligation’) of a corpus of biology texts which the learners were reading during their academic courses, is done using two methods: One manual and the other computational. The findings show occurrences of language patterns through concordancing . Language teachers are provided with useful guidelines as to how they can provide prospective students of a particular academic community with an experience in acquiring fundamental concepts of their discipline before they become members of their target community. The present research makes a potential contribution to the study of the English language (E.S.P.) by examining closely both the lexis and the grammar of one specific genre i.e. scientific journal articles utilising computerised technology. The thesis consists of six chapters. ‘Chapter One’ establishes the research area by introducing the research questions with reference to a specific scientific community. ‘Chapter Two’ deals with the review of the literature of the two concepts, namely ‘discourse community’ and ‘discourse analysis’, related to this research. ‘Chapter Three’ describes the English teaching/learning context through questionnaires study. ‘Chapter Four’ specifies the corpus for a manual analysis. In ‘Chapter Five’ a computational analysis of the same corpus is done using concordancing. ‘Chapter Six’ covers the pedagogical implications.