This paper presents a comparison of genre use at three Swiss universities from different language regions. The methodology is one of contrastive genre mapping in which we connect two lines of research usually seen as distinct approaches. The aim of the study is to find ways of comparing the writing cultures of different languages by collecting and comparing the genres used for teaching. Data about genres were gathered through questionnaires in which students and faculty members were asked to describe writing assignments and student texts. From the answers to these questionnaires, genre inventories were constructed and then rechecked with insiders in faculty discussions or interviews. As results, lists of genres from the individual universities are presented, as are the patterns of genre families into which the genres were classified. It turned out that genre use shows strong similarities across the three universities. The main genre families are presented and differences between universities are discussed.

Phraseology has long been used in L2 teaching of academic writing, and corpus linguistics has played a major role in the compilation and assessment of academic phrases. However, there are only a few interactive academic writing tools in which corpus methodology is implemented in a real-time design to support formulation processes. In this paper, we describe several corpus-related methods that we have developed and implemented as part of an interactive thesis-writing tool, Thesis Writer, designed and constructed jointly by the Language Competence Centre and the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. Thesis Writer (TW) hosts several linguisticsupport tools and is designed in its first pilot version to support thesis writing in economics with the help of two self-compiled corpora in English and German. Students can access the corpora directly via the IMS Open Corpus Workbench or via a pre-selected collection of central rhetorical elements through the phrase book. Several search options and tutorials have been tested and included into the TW platform: the corpus simple search tool, the corpus syntactic search tool, and the academic phrasebook. In the case of the latter, a new methodology led to the identification of lists of phrases distributed in research-cycle sections of the thesis.

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This study aims to analyse the effects of a digitally enhanced teaching strategy in an ESP course. The intervention method consists of guided corpus linguistics exercises which are progressively introduced to improve the students’ academic writing. We collected data from various task-based corpus processing, consultation and analysis stages, each one having a different complexity level: compilation of a discipline-specific expert corpus, consultation of a native speaker English corpus and analyses of both types. The pre- and post-intervention results are quantitatively and qualitatively assessed, controlling for discipline specificity. The results of a corpus consultation satisfaction survey are also included in the analysis. We conclude that corpus consultations not only lead to the improvement of ESP students’ writing but also increasing student motivation. The recommendation is to first test the digital methods in ESP courses and calibrate them according to disciplinary settings.