Using The Prime Machine to Untangle the Patterns of Academic Paraphrases

An essential skill in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is paraphrasing. Since language learners typically do not have the same linguistic resources for reformulating expressions to convey the same meaning, they often rely on specific skills, such as using synonyms, reorganising sentences and changing word class. However, if a reformulated paraphrase does not reflect the typical patterning of its changed vocabulary items, high-level readers will tend to perceive it as being unnatural. Corpus methods can help direct and support EAP in a number of ways. From a classroom perspective, EAP can be enriched through access to corpus data as a source of multitudinous examples of how words and phrases are used in different academic contexts. Corpora offer ways for teachers to demonstrate differences between synonyms using authentic language data and for learners to engage with a host of language acquisition processes as they explore patterns of language use for themselves through Data Driven Learning. However, while there are a number of corpus tools for academic English language work, the main corpus functions for EAP in most of these tools are not the most straightforward. This chapter introduces the main features of The Prime Machine—a corpus tool which was designed for EAP students to use to compare and contrast similar words and phrases, and for teachers to use as a reference tool. As well as introducing the workflow for comparing words with similar meanings, the chapter will explain how concordance summary data compatible with Hoey’s (Lexical priming: A new theory of words and language, Routledge, 2005) theory of lexical priming make the app particularly useful for EAP. The app is cross-platform, running on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android and is free to download and use.