Books by Madalina Chitez
University Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation, 2018
This book explores specific issues related to academic writing provision in the post-communist co... more This book explores specific issues related to academic writing provision in the post-communist countries in Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. Although they have different cultures and writing traditions, these countries share common features in what regards the development of higher education and research and encounter challenges different from Western European countries.
Since academic writing as a discipline is relatively new in Eastern Europe, but currently plays an essential part in the development of higher education and the process of European integration, the volume aims to open discussion on academic writing in the region by addressing several issues such as the specific challenges in providing academic writing support at tertiary level in post-communist countries, the limitations and possibilities in implementing Western models of academic writing provision, or the complex interactions between writing in national languages and writing in a second language.
Additionally, the book presents several recent initiatives and possible models for providing academic writing support in universities in the area. The important role of academic writing in English, a common feature in post-communist countries, is reflected in the sections which focus on writing in English as a foreign language, as well as on the impact of English upon national languages.
The volume will be of interest to academic writing researchers and teachers and those involved in teaching academic writing at the tertiary level.
Working Papers in Applied Linguistics, 2016
At European universities, writing is a traditional way of learning, assessment, and independent s... more At European universities, writing is a traditional way of learning, assessment, and independent study, but it is handled in an implicit, tradition-based way that has only recently been contrasted with and supported by a more explicit writing pedagogy. Still, little systematic knowledge is available about the pedagogical approaches to writing, writing practices, and genres across Europe and much of it is codified in the national languages without correlation to internationally accepted terminology and theories. This book explores the writing cultures of Europe, nation by nation, and reports the idiosyncrasies for each respective country. The reports are based on a 17-item topic list used by the authors to collect data before synthesizing the results. Next to writing practices and genres, a high level of emphasis was placed on the structure of educational systems, the languages in use, and the kind of support provided for student writers.
Note: This research project has been conducted within the framework of COST Action IS0703 “European Research Network on Learning to Write Effectively”, funded by the European Union. We are also thankful to Christiane Donahue, Eliza Kitis, Charles Bazerman, Helmut Gruber, and David Russell for their cooperation and support in this project.
Aiming at exemplifying the methodology of learner corpus profiling, this book describes salient f... more Aiming at exemplifying the methodology of learner corpus profiling, this book describes salient features of Romanian Learner English. As a starting point, the volume offers a comprehensive presentation of the Romanian-English contrastive studies. Another innovative aspect of the book refers to the use of the first Romanian Corpus of Learner English, whose compilation is the object of a methodological discussion. In one of the main chapters, the book introduces the methodology of learner corpus profiling and compares it with existing approaches. The profiling approach is emphasised by corpus-based quantitative and qualitative investigations of Romanian Learner English. Part of the investigation is dedicated to the lexico-grammatical profiles of articles, prepositions and genitives. The frequency-based collocation analyses are integrated with error analyses and extended into error pattern samples. Furthermore, contrasting typical Romanian Learner English constructions with examples from the German and the Italian learner corpora opens the path to new contrastive interlanguage analyses.
Papers by Madalina Chitez
Studies About Languages, Dec 21, 2023
To compensate, even if on a small scale, for the scarcity of investigations of English-into-Roman... more To compensate, even if on a small scale, for the scarcity of investigations of English-into-Romanian machine translation from a corpus-based genre-specific perspective, this case study concerns the translation between these languages, by Google Translate, of texts belonging to two different, but closely-related genres-everyday and newspaper/ news releases language. In particular, it aims to offer a view of the translation errors in the Romanian target texts and, implicitly, of translation quality. To meet this aim, a translation error analysis is performed, starting from Keshavarz's (1999) very general model of error analysis, and a linguistic error profile is created for each of the two genres taken into consideration. The errors identified are discussed and illustrated with small-scale corpus examples. Since translation errors, affecting translation quality, are the direct consequence of the capabilities of the Google translation platform, the findings of this paper may be relevant for the developers of this platform. They may get a clearer picture of its strengths and limitations and suggest ways of improving it so that it can ultimately provide higher quality translations when working with the English-Romanian pair of languages, with the particular text genres looked at here. It may also contribute to raising translators' attention to the areas that are potentially problematic in these contexts, in the post-editing stage.
Springer eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
The chapter aims at providing an overview of the modalities in which linguistic corpora have been... more The chapter aims at providing an overview of the modalities in which linguistic corpora have been integrated in writing related approaches and technologies. The history of corpus linguistics is almost one century old, demonstrating a wide range of applications and interdisciplinary research potential. In this study, two main directions have been identified which describe approaches at the interface of corpora and writing. The first direction is represented by a large body of literature and refers to the use of corpora for academic writing research. The second direction focuses on the applicability of corpora for writing support, covering three aspects: (a) A section on corpora as a basis for primary linguistic tools for writers, which illustrates the use of corpora for the creation of dictionaries and phraseology lists. (b) A section on the use of corpora to teach academic writing. This section captures and exemplifies Data Driven Learning methods for corpus based academic writing and tools that support such approaches. (c) The third section refers to the use of built-in corpora for the creation of writing support tools (e.g. Ludwig.guru) or corpus related integrative tools (e.g. Thesis Writer). Keywords Academic writing • Writing tools • Corpus based writing tools • Corpus linguistics 1 Overview 1.1 Introduction Language use and writing strategies are two inseparable facets of the same process: knowledge creation and sharing. In order to produce valuable pieces of writing, either creative or scientific in nature, writers of all ages and competence levels are
Springer eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
This chapter explores the ability of digital technologies to provide language support for writers... more This chapter explores the ability of digital technologies to provide language support for writers. With such ability, technologies directly intervene into the productive act of language creation, which we refer to by the traditional term formulation. Formulation here is defined as the kind of thinking that happens when a writer tries to linearize thought by using language. In written communication, formulation happens during interaction with an inscription tool and is strongly influenced by the kind of technology used. In this chapter, we look into some of the changes in formulation and language crafting that followed the introduction of digital technologies. We attempt to estimate where the developments are heading by addressing four issues: (1) support for the preparation of formulation, (2) real-time support during inscription, (3) support for the choice of words and collocations, and (4) support for language use at the revision stage by automated feedback and intelligent tutoring. The contribution concludes with some thoughts about future directions.
This study centres on the developing and testing stages of a literacy support tool dedicated to y... more This study centres on the developing and testing stages of a literacy support tool dedicated to young schoolchildren. The LEMI tool is currently in development (since January 2023) at the CODHUS research centre (Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities) from the West University of Timișoara, Romania. LEMI aims to stimulate interest in reading during the first individual and collective reading activities (ages 7-11). This aim will be achieved by creating a digital reading repository with a user-friendly interface that verifies reading text complexity and delivers automatic reading-level reports to users. We use corpus linguistics methods to create a text complexity formula adapted to the Romanian language, which can be integrated into the automated complexity evaluation interface in LEMI. The necessity of such an instrument is motivated by the fact that, in Romania, there are increased rates of functional illiteracy and school dropout. We hypothesise that texts must be level-adapted (according to grade or readability) for schoolchildren to relate positively to reading activities. In the Romanian context, LEMI is the first digital tool wholly tailored to children's literature, which complements national curricula and didactic materials provided to young children. Distinctively, LEMI responds to the need for easyto-use tools to adapt reading individually, according to the reader's profile. LEMI is a unique tool, not only for Romanian but also for children's literature in other languages. The functionalities of the LEMI pilot version will be tested with the partners involved in the project (three schools from Timiș county and an educational NGO).
Building Roger: Technical Challenges While Developing a Bilingual Corpus Management and Query Platform
arXiv (Cornell University), Jul 29, 2023
This paper presents the methodology and data used for the automatic extraction of the Romanian Ac... more This paper presents the methodology and data used for the automatic extraction of the Romanian Academic Word List (Ro-AWL). Academic Word Lists are useful in both L2 and L1 teaching contexts. For the Romanian language, no such resource exists so far. Ro-AWL has been generated by combining methods from corpus and computational linguistics with L2 academic writing approaches. We use two types of data: (a) existing data, such as the Romanian Frequency List based on the ROMBAC corpus, and (b) self-compiled data, such as the expert academic writing corpus EXPRES. For constructing the academic word list, we follow the methodology for building the Academic Vocabulary List for the English language. The distribution of Ro-AWL features (general distribution, POS distribution) into four disciplinary datasets is in line with previous research. Ro-AWL is freely available and can be used for teaching, research and NLP applications.
Using the bilingual Corpus of Romanian Academic Genres (ROGER) platform to improve students’ academic writing
Schreiben unter Bedingungen von Mehrsprachigkeit
Peter Lang D eBooks, Jul 19, 2012
Recent advances in NLP have been sustained by the availability of large amounts of 1 data and sta... more Recent advances in NLP have been sustained by the availability of large amounts of 1 data and standardized benchmarks, which are not available for many languages. As 2 a small step towards addressing this, we propose LiRo, a platform for benchmarking 3 models on the Romanian language on nine standard tasks: text classification, 4 named entity recognition, machine translation, sentiment analysis, POS tagging, 5 dependency parsing, language modelling, question-answering, and semantic textual 6 similarity. We also include a less standard task of Romanian embeddings debiasing, 7 to address the growing concerns related to gender bias in language models. The 8 platform exposes per-task leaderboards populated with baseline results for each 9 task. In addition, we create three new datasets: one from Romanian Wikipedia 10 and two by translating the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmark and 11 the Cross-lingual Question Answering Dataset (XQuAD) into Romanian. We 12 believe LiRo will no...
Quaestiones Romanicae
Liste de cuvinte academice în limbile română și engleză: o analiză contrastivă bazată pe corpus A... more Liste de cuvinte academice în limbile română și engleză: o analiză contrastivă bazată pe corpus Abstract: (Academic Word Lists in English and Romanian: a corpus-based contrastive analysis) For multiple reasons, there is a lack of studies on Academic Writing in Romanian languagefew scholars deal with an overview of writing practices in Romanian HEIs, even fewer deal with the vocabulary or writing principles specific to certain disciplines. In this context, the Romanian "scientific production" is extremely varied at the discursive level, both because of the lack of standardised curriculum concerning Academic Writing and because of the heterogeneity of writing rules and publication conditions imposed by Romanian journals. The aim of this study is to analyse the relevance of Academic Word Lists for Romanian academic writing, bringing into discussion examples and methodologies from the English language sphere, where tools such as the one proposed by Avery Coxhead in the late 1990s have proven their effectiveness. The applied dimension of this paper is based on the analysis of an expert, bilingual corpus of scientific articles-EXPREScompiled within the DACRE project (Discipline-specific expert academic writing in Romanian and English: corpus-based contrastive analysis models). The aim of the study is to propose and exemplify the possibility of constructing such a glossary based on writing practices, by examining some of the results provided by corpus linguistics tools such as N-Grams or concordance lines.
CALL and complexity – short papers from EUROCALL 2019, 2019
Corpora are valuable technology-supported learning resources to be used by autonomous language le... more Corpora are valuable technology-supported learning resources to be used by autonomous language learners or during teacher-guided lessons. This study explores the potential of corpus consultation approaches for the improvement of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students’ academic writing skills. We investigated the effects of three types of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) activities in a sample group of 29 first-year and second-year students majoring in Geography for Tourism at a Romanian university, consisting of writing tasks supported by: a Learner Corpus (LC), a Native-Speaker Corpus (NSC), and a Web-based Corpus (WBC). The research methodology involves the combination of quantitative and qualitative data, extracted from pre- and post-intervention corpus analyses, with the results of a learner-satisfaction questionnaire. The findings indicate a significant differentiation in the complexity of the lexico-grammatical features used by learners in consequent intervention stages and a ...
8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'22)
Internationalisation is a desired goal for contemporary universities, which are increasingly usin... more Internationalisation is a desired goal for contemporary universities, which are increasingly using concepts like cultural diversity or globalism as selling points to attract students. However, these concepts are not always clearly defined in terms of underlying values and lived experience. We used a corpus linguistics approach to extract university descriptors of the term ‘internationalisation’. For that purpose, we compiled the INTER corpus (Corpus of Internationalisation Terminology in Higher Education Institutions in Europe), which includes texts extracted from the websites of 50 European Universities. We analyse the lexical profile of the tokens semantically connected to the concept of ‘internationalisation’. To verify whether the advertised concepts of internationalisation match the lived experience of the students, we use a second corpus, LIVIT (Corpus of Lived Internationalisation Experiences), which includes 300 testimonies of student mobility. All data and analyses capture ...
Kontrastives Genre-Mapping : didaktische Genres an Pädagogischen Hochschulen des französisch-, deutsch- und italienischsprachigen Teils der Schweiz
In this contribution, we report on a study of contrastive genre research in which we collected ge... more In this contribution, we report on a study of contrastive genre research in which we collected genres from three Swiss Universities of Teacher Education of different languages. Our aim is to come to an understanding of the commonalities and differences of their writing cultures. Two lines of research are brought together. One is contrastive genre research comparing text genres in different languages or disciplines, the other one is genre mapping, setting out to collect, study and classify genres in a certain context. Theoretical issues of intercultural linguistics and problems of multilingual terminologies are discussed as well as general principles of contrastive genre mapping. Data were collected through multilingual questionnaires and during faculty workshops. The genre inventories resulting from data collection and first classifications are fully documented in order to demonstrate the kind of materials resulting from genre mapping. Contrasting the genre inventories from the three universities shows a striking similarity in their genre profiles even though some specific genres could be identified for each of the universities. It is concluded that the discipline-specific influences on writing cultures are more pervasive than are the language-specific influences
Navigating Corpora for Self-Directed LSP Writing: A Comparative Study of Digital Method and Resource Integration in L1 Versus L2 Language Courses
Mediating Specialized Knowledge and L2 Abilities, 2021
European Higher Education Area: Challenges for a New Decade, 2020
The modern university has the potential to turn into a nexus of digital embracement and innovatio... more The modern university has the potential to turn into a nexus of digital embracement and innovation, thus responding to both strategic planning for higher education and societal demands. Priorities in digitalisation strategies (White Paper ‘Bologna Digital 2020’, Rampelt et al. 2019) for higher education institutions (HEIs) are actively promoted, and their implementation is in progress throughout Europe. However, the embedding of the digitalisation reform at the institutional level is considerably uneven from one country to another, with Eastern European HEIs lagging behind (Conrads et al. 2017). The aim of this position paper is to present and discuss the case of digital humanities (DH) as an incentive for digitalisation strategies at Eastern European universities. We briefly contextualize the configuration of DH initiatives in the region by using the results of the Digital Humanities Survey and propose the case study of Romania, where we investigate the implementation status of suc...
2. Romanian Learner English: research scope
Learner corpus profiles
International Online Journal of Education and Teaching, 2019
One of the challenges in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms is teaching writing genre... more One of the challenges in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms is teaching writing genres, especially to students who come from fields that are taught in L1. This is presumably “not only because different languages seem to have different ways of organizing ideas and structuring arguments but because students’ prior writing experiences in the home, school or elsewhere do not prepare them for the literacy expectations of their university or professional workplace” (Hyland, 2013, p. 95). In our study, we analyze 36 argumentative essays written by students of Political Science and International Relations in an English for Social Sciences (ESP-adapted) course taught at the West University of Timisoara in Romania. The essays are written in English and the students’ L1 is Romanian. The aim of the study is to find out to what extent argumentative structures in English are influenced by Romanian academic writing genre norms. For our analysis, we use corpus linguistics methods, looki...
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Books by Madalina Chitez
Since academic writing as a discipline is relatively new in Eastern Europe, but currently plays an essential part in the development of higher education and the process of European integration, the volume aims to open discussion on academic writing in the region by addressing several issues such as the specific challenges in providing academic writing support at tertiary level in post-communist countries, the limitations and possibilities in implementing Western models of academic writing provision, or the complex interactions between writing in national languages and writing in a second language.
Additionally, the book presents several recent initiatives and possible models for providing academic writing support in universities in the area. The important role of academic writing in English, a common feature in post-communist countries, is reflected in the sections which focus on writing in English as a foreign language, as well as on the impact of English upon national languages.
The volume will be of interest to academic writing researchers and teachers and those involved in teaching academic writing at the tertiary level.
Note: This research project has been conducted within the framework of COST Action IS0703 “European Research Network on Learning to Write Effectively”, funded by the European Union. We are also thankful to Christiane Donahue, Eliza Kitis, Charles Bazerman, Helmut Gruber, and David Russell for their cooperation and support in this project.
Papers by Madalina Chitez