Development of the Specialised Corpus of English for Materials Science

Within the field of English for Research Publication Purposes (erpp), corpora can contribute valuable insights towards a better understanding of the issue of accuracy and role of language errors. Multilingual scholars, such as the Japanese scientists targeted in this corpus project, often know that their written English is prone to errors but, nevertheless, may feel powerless to deal with the problem. This short paper presents an account of corpus building for research and pedagogical application in erpp. It outlines the design and development of a corpus of research article manuscripts written by Japanese materials scientists. The Specialised Corpus of English for Materials Science (scems) comprises manuscript versions both before and after copyediting and, importantly, a sub-corpus of sentence-level grammar errors and their grammatical reconstructions. For comparative purposes, it also includes a set of research articles published in high-impact journals from the same field of materials science. With 2,490 sentences containing an estimated total of 4,500 errors, the scems, thus, establishes an empirical basis for the identification of error patterns in the research writing of the target population of Japanese materials scientists and the subsequent development of specialised pedagogical resources to support that population.