Discussion and challenge: Linguistic resources

Undergraduate students in the School of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad de Buenos Aires attend a reading comprehension course in English divided in three levels. They read research articles in English and reformulate them in Spanish. In three semesters they have to become independent readers who may be able to read a complete research article written in English. To achieve this aim, they are trained in the use of reading strategies, text rhetorical organization and frequently-selected lexicogrammatical units. The goal of this work is to compare the lexicogrammatical units used by researchers in the abstracts and the introductory sections of two articles. One article belongs to the discussion type, whereas the other belongs to the challenge type. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus was used. The results indicated that the researcher who questions an established position selects units with a negative connotation more frequently. On the other hand, the researcher who dialogues with different positions uses modals or mood adjuncts indicating probability or inclination more frequently and the frequency of units with negative connotation decreases. Although the corpus is small, the results may be useful to improve the strategies of pedagogical intervention in reading comprehension lessons.