Statistical Analyses of Academic English in Medical, Pharmacological and Dental Fields to Help Japanese Researchers in Presenting Papers

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24590622
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Medical sociology
• Research Institution: Fukui Prefectural University
• Principal Investigator: OHTAKE Hiroshi 福井県立大学, 学術教養センター, 教授 (20149925)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): UGAWA Yoshihiro 宮城教育大学, 環境教育実践教育センター, 教授 (20232803) ; MORREN Brian 宮城教育大学, 環境教育実践教育センター, 教授 (20244519) ; KAWAMOTO Takeshi 広島大学, 医歯薬保健学研究院, 助教 (50224861) ; KANEKO Shuji 京都大学, 薬学研究科(研究院), 教授 (60177516) ; TAKEKOSHI Masataka 東海大学, 医学部, 講師 (80221373) ; TAKEUCHI Hiroaki 静岡大学, 理学(系)研究科, 教授 (90216854)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: ライフサイエンス英語 / コーパス / コンコーダンス / 口演英語 / 論文英語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The aim of this research was to analyze English sentences produced by Japanese researchers with the goal of shedding light on common problems, and to help researchers improve their English for presentations. It is not uncommon for native Japanese speakers to produce unnatural English sentences, even if those sentences are correct in terms of grammar and vocabulary. To make the trouble spots clearer, three corpora were compiled; one consisted of academic written English by native English researchers, the second was spoken English by native English speakers and the third was academic written English by Japanese researchers. By analyzing each corpus and comparing the results, Japanese researchers were found to generally lack a sense of distinction between written English and spoken English, which leads to their inclination to overuse basic English verbs in academic writing when words originating from Greek or Latin are generally preferred.

Free Research Field

応用言語学