DACRE – Discipline-specific expert academic writing in Romanian and English: corpus-based contrastive analysis models

Why research in expert academic writing?
Successful academics and professionals need to master linguistic and text-rhetoric skills that have the potential to make disciplinary knowledge accessible to all sectors of society.

Applied Corpus Linguistics research
The project DACRE aims to fill the gap in applied corpus linguistics research adapted to the Romanian context, which uses corpus linguistics methods to investigate on and generate support for discipline-specific academic writing.

EXPRES – Expert Writing Corpus
Research in DACRE is based on the data from the corpus EXPRES (Corpus of Expert Writing in Romanian and English), compiled in the frame of the project. The EXPRES sub-corpora represent twelve data-sets (around 7 million words) of expert academic writing, i.e. research articles, in Romanian, English L1 and English L2, from four disciplines.

Aim
The main objective in DACRE is the creation of methodological models for corpus related contrastive analyses (Romanian-English) emerging from the detailed investigation of the compiled corpora: salient discipline-specific academic writing features (e.g. lexical preferences) and the Romanian academic writing features (e.g. collocations).
The interactive platform DACRE, with free corpus searches, corpus-based discipline-specific tools (e.g. academic phrasebank) and teaching recommendations, is an open-access deliverable of the project. The corpus is dynamic so the platform can be adapted for further disciplines.

Impact and applications
The project contributes the improvement of the academic writing performance of the target groups (students, faculty, researchers and professionals).
Acknowledgement
Research in DACRE project (Discipline-specific expert academic writing in Romanian and English: corpus-based contrastive analysis models) is supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization – UEFISCDI, project number 158 / 2021 (PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0821, project period: 2021-2022), awarded to Dr Habil Madalina Chitez (PI), from the West University of Timisoara, Romania.