Abstract

GODINEZ LOPEZ, Eva Margarita  and  ALARCON NEVE, Luisa Josefina. Los sustantivos abstractos en la escritura y evaluación de textos académicos. Enunciación [online]. 2021, vol.26, n.1, pp.106-118. ISSN 0122-6339.  https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14483/22486798.16688.

High school students are exposed to an increasingly complex academic discourse, and they are expected to adopt the conventions of such discourse in their own texts. In the interest of knowing the skills associated with academic writing proficiency, a corpus of texts produced by high school students in central Mexico was analyzed. These texts were grouped according to academic writing proficiency as perceived by five judges, experts in the use of rubrics to evaluate writing. Nouns in the corpus were categorized under semantic criteria into concrete and abstract, and statistical tests were performed to correlate the use of these categories with the level of perceived proficiency (high/low), with special interest in abstract nouns, due to their attributed cognitive complexity. The method was quantitative correlational, and automated lexical analysis tools were used. The results indicate that the use of abstract nouns in the texts influences the way in which they are rated by the judges: the best rated texts have a high proportion of abstract nouns, especially of theoretical constructs and concepts, which, although rarely used, mark a different perceived level of writing proficiency. This information allows a better understanding of the uses of language that are valued in academic discourse and are associated with its writing; at the same time, they invite reflection on the convenience of critically analyzing these patterns in academic discursive culture, prior to their incorporation into the classroom.

Keywords : corpus linguistics; academic discourse; academic writing; abstract nouns; text evaluation; high school.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )