Error Analysis of medical research articles by Japanese learner and its application to instruction based on learner corpus data

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The purpose of this research is to both ground theory and establish effective teaching methods of academic writing for Japanese EFL (English as a Foreign Language), particularly EMP (English for Medical Purposes) learners, by creating a learner corpus database written by Japanese medical PhD students, and comparing it with an English native speaker corpus. We collected a small amount of learner data and compiled a small corpus database entitled: Students’ Abstracts of Medical Mock Experiment (SAME) corpus. The students were required to produce an English abstract of at least 200 words on a given mock medical experiment. The abstract was required to be written according to the IMRD (Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussions) structure, but had to be finalized as a single meaningful, cohesive paragraph, not as separate sections. The topic of the experiment was a Helicobacter pylori infection and the outline of the experiment was briefly explained in Japanese. Each manuscript was collected and compiled electronically as a text file. The data was analyzed using the corpus software AntConc. We have presented the research results at two international conferences. The results indicated that 1) learners who have the ability to write grammatically correct sentences do not necessarily use stylistically appropriate or genre conscious expressions, and 2)students awareness of genre was not correlated to level of accuracy. The learners can be categorized roughly into four groups according to their levels of accuracy and genre awareness. We concluded that it would be too late to start teaching academic writing from a graduate level, and that Japanese learners should be encouraged to acquire basic academic writing skills at an earlier stage, that is, as undergraduates.