Corpus-informed research has moved from being an outlier to an almost indespensible tool in developing principled, data-driven approaches to writing pedagogy (Biber et al. Hyland etc.) Another highly productive approach is genre-based, utilizing insights from systemic functional grammar. Much recent research on the development of the student writer's scholarly voice has focused on attitudinal aspects such as reporting verbs and stance adverbials, hedging and boosting etc. (refs?) These aspects are highly significant, yet the core of academic writing, the grammatical choices emerging scholars make at the level of the clause and clause complex has not been so deeply investigated using these tools. This colloquium will explore how using corpus analyses and systemic functional grammar together can reveal how emergent student writers over time develop their strategies for establishing a scholarly stance.

This work is based on analysis of the syntactic features found within an eight million word corpus of first year composition (FYC) collected from undergraduate students in the American Midwest and comparisons are made with the writing of more advanced students in the MICUSP corpus, and academic writing by professionals in the COCA corpus. The presenters analyzed a subset of the FYC corpus drawn from two courses taught by the same instructor to students with similar educational backgrounds and socio-economic status from 1989 to 2013. The data is therefore highly comparable in terms of writing topics, and avoids variability that might have been due to different instructors using different methods, and can also show trends in student writing.

Thematic prominence and information focus in the English clause shape the structures of English texts, cf. Halliday (1985), Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985), Dillon (1981), Biber, et al. (1999). Building on an analysis of a corpus of FYC texts, this paper analyzes the discourse functions served by thematic organization and information focus in texts of college writers.

At the CCCC last year, while studying the use of relative clauses in the FYC corpus, the data led me to conclude that there was a gradient phenomenon in particular subordinate stuctures that seemed to function more like coordinated structures in the work of FYC students:

Fluent writers (cf., Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985)

College composition students

Suggesting that nonrestrictive relative pronouns exhibit the syntactic and semantic features of both coordination and subordination. Thus, a gradient emerges in the writing of FY students that we do not see in more fluent writers:

PARATAXIS |–and —————–which —–when₁ —when₂ –| HYPOTAXIS

This study attempts to explore other subordinate structures and departs from much of the previous research into composition by presenting a functional linguistic analysis. Earlier research focused on the frequency with which certain linguistic features occur; however, more interesting questions query the functions played by those features. Functional descriptions of language — like the one offered here — are more valuable since they offer some understanding of communicative purpose and, thus, explain the use and frequency of linguistic features.

More explicitly, I hypothesize:

STYLISTIC MOTIVATION

Many stylistic errors in college compositions originate through the indeterminacy of clausal relations; this relationship between indeterminacy and style is a developmental phenomenon, evidenced by comparing the work of early FYC writers, to the work of students at the end of FYC, students at the end at the end of their undergraduate degrees (as in the MICUSP data), to graduate students (MICUSP again), to published academic writers (COCA).