Discourse Community Collocations and L2 Writing Content

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.