Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

Both reading and writing abstracts require specific language skills and conceptual capacities, which may challenge advanced learners. This paper draws explicitly upon the "Emergence" and "Scientext" research projects which focused on the lexis of scientific texts in French and English. The teaching objective of the project…

Subtechnical vocabulary includes items that are neither highly technical nor obviously general, and rhetorical/organizational items are in this category. They serve to signal the writer's intentions or his/her evaluation of the material presented. A technique for identifying subtechnical items is explained. Three identified items are analyzed, and…