Student abstracts: problems and remedies

Student abstracts: problems and remedies, Hans Platzer & Desiree Verdonk

In addition to talks, workshops, panels, debates and symposiums, there are colourful and well-prepared poster presentations at IATEFL conference. Here is one that caught my attention:

This poster presentation is based on a corpus analysis of undergraduate students' abstracts written by German students and a reference corpus with published abstracts. The researchers find out that there is an overuse of passive voice in learner corpus comparison with reference corpus. As an implication, they suggest that active voice should be revised. Another important finding is that learner corpus includes substantially less use of “evaluative that” than reference corpus. As an implication, they suggest focusing on the use of evaluative that in the class.

It is a good-quality research study that has a clear link between corpus linguistics and pedagogy!