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Descripción
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| There are two main ways of approaching the degree of specialisation of a scientific text (Ciapuscio & Kugel, 2002; Edo-Marzà, 2011, p. 298): Some authors refer to a "sharp line" or "clear-cut boundary allowing for a fast and easy distinction between general and specialised language". This distinction would be mainly based on "the specificity of the topics dealt with, addressers and addressees and communicative situations" (Edo-Marzà, 2011, p. 298). Other authors mention that there is a continuum and that "the difference between general and specific is a matter of degree" (Cabré, 1993, 1999; Edo-Marzà, 2011, p. 298). The approach adopted in this research in progress coincides with the second perspective, and in particular with the three levels mentioned by Cabré: highly specialised, specialised and fairly specialised. Our study is aimed at measuring the degree of specialisation of some candidate texts that would be used in class and tested in detail so as to validate them and determine the effect these might have in an English for Specific Purposes learning context in the coming years. This paper is focused on the initial stage of our research, which consists in the analysis of a corpus of twelve recent texts belonging to the domain of Biotechnology and classified into three main genres, i.e. opinion, review, and original articles. In order to measure specialisation, we considered lexical richness and variation (Edo-Marzà, 2011) as well as function, genre and tenor relationship (Edo-Marzà, 2011; Vargas-Sierra, 2005). Moreover, we conducted a brief qualitative analysis of the initial implementation of some of these texts with a group of 58 students following an English for Professional and Academic Communication course at the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). Preliminary findings suggest that the corpus shows different degrees of specialisation. In terms of their usefulness and suitability, the first impressions shared by the students with the whole group after reading and analysing several sections were positive. However, they found that some parts were quite complex and difficult to understand despite their high level of linguistic and scientific competence. | |
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Internacional
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Si |
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Nombre congreso
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AELFE 2018 |
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Entidad organizadora
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Universidad Camilo José Cela |
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Nacionalidad Entidad
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ESPAÑA |
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Lugar/Ciudad de impartición
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Madrid |
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Fecha inicio
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28/06/2018 |
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Fecha fin
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29/06/2018 |