A Resource on Dialogical Moves in Native and Non-Native Academic Writers of English

Abstract

This paper provides a new approach to the study of linguistic differences in research articles written by native and non-native English writers, including a novel linguistic resource. Conceptually, we propose a functional definition of academic nativeness. Empirically, we operationalize this definition through a survey and the development of a reliable automatic method to distinguish academic natives from non-natives. We then release a corpus of 80 research articles in the field of Linguistics, with introductions manually and reliably annotated for dialogical moves. Preliminary experiments indicate that automatic annotation using large language models remains challenging. Furthermore, the linguistic features that differentiate academic natives and non-natives diverge from those typically associated with general native/non-native English distinctions. These findings aim to inform and enhance academic writing pedagogy, while also offering insights relevant to broader language and corpus studies, as well as computational research.

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