ASAWEC: towards a corpus of Arab scholars’ academic written English

Linguistic corpora have been used in a wide range in recent years. Different types of linguistics analyses in both spoken and written discourses are being conducted using the corpus linguistics approach. Among these, academic writing has received considerable attention. Corpus linguistics has provided insights into the academic writing of both native and non-native English language learners and writers in general. Nevertheless, relatively few studies have investigated this topic in the Arab EFL setting. Consequently, there is a relative paucity in corpora of Academic written English by Arab speakers. To address this gap, we compiled the Arab Scholars’ Academic Written English Corpus (ASAWEC) which is a specialized corpus of Arab scholars’ academic written English. We collected the corpus texts according to specific criteria, and then we normalized and cleaned the data. The texts were then tokenized and tagged and the corpus underwent initial tests which yields insightful findings on Arab scholars’ academic written English such as the low lexical diversity and the utilization of various discourse techniques. The present paper introduces the corpus, provides details on its compilation, presents initial results and statistics, and discusses potential limitations and future perspectives for updating the corpus. It is envisaged that this project will encourage the use of the ASAWEC and help in launching similar initiatives to advance research in Arab corpus linguistics.