Le lexique transdisciplinaire des écrits scientifiques dans les mémoires de diplôme des étudiants polonophones de français

Abstract

The issue that we aim to investigate in this paper is related to the design of lexical resources which Polish university students use in the process of writing an academic text in French. In the course of the research, we concentrate on the transdisciplinary lexis composed of, on the one hand, cross-disciplinary terminology typical of scientific writings, and, on the other hand, of abstract, non-specialised vocabulary. In this regard, special focus is given to transdisciplinary collocations referring to scientific objects and procedures. The research is conducted on a corpus consisting of BA and MA theses written by Polish university students of French in Romance philology and applied linguistics faculties.The work progressed as follows. Firstly, the types of transdisciplinary collocations present in students’ theses were identified. They were then juxtaposed with the lexical resources gathered in the corpus of scientific texts in French (Corpus Écrits scientifiques en français). Finally, the manner in which students used the investigated collocations was analysed so as to identify the possible difficulties faced by non-native students of French. The objectives of this research are linguistic and didactic at the same time. Specifically, it aims to inventorystudents’ lexical resources, their scope and, as a result, to consider pedagogical solutions intended to enrich transdisciplinary vocabulary used in the process of writing scientific texts in university context. The analysis performed shows a weak presence of collocations containing scientific names. The students’ repertoire of lexical resources is relatively poor and not very varied. It is necessary to undertake more indepth work on the linguistic correction of the items mobilized.