Corpus-Based Approaches to Writing: CCCC 2016 Workshop

Examples

Pedagogical applications of corpus linguistics

Greenbaum 1980s. mega-corpus. Large corpora followed: COBUILD (Bank of English); BNC (British National Corpus); ICE International Corpus of English; CIC (Cambridge International Corpus); COCA. etc.

EAP has led the way in exploiting corpus findings for pedagogy.

Swales, J. M. (2004). Then and now: A reconsideration of the first corpus of scientific English. Iberica, 8, 5-21.

Candlin and Thurston (1997). Exploring academic English: A workbook for student essay writing. Sydney: National Centre for English language teaching and research, Macquarie University. (One of the first books on applications.)

Swales, J.M. (2006). Corpus Linguistics and English for academic purposes. In E. Arno Macia, A. Soler Cervera & C. Rueda Ramos (Eds.), Information technology in languages for specific purposes. New York: Springer.

Small specialized corpora such as MICASE (spoken texts, both NS and NNS) have “more homongeneity across texts …,and suitable for genre-based investigations and analyses that take into account interactional, pragmatic, and contextual features in addition to the purely linguistic ones.” (Lee 2001, p.37 in Swales 2006).

MICASE revealed very interesting distinctions between academic writing and academic “conversation.” Academic speech is closer to ordinary conversation than academic prose. Importance of common words and phrases like thing; just; ok, so now, feel (meaning think) and “wobbly” modals like might, would and could.(p. 22).

Useful in teaching students how to interpret and take part in academic spoken interaction.

How to utilize concordance lines in LSP classes.

Observant practitioner can note what does/does not occur linguistically in certain genres and contexts (e.g. subject initial ellipsis). P.28

Pedagogical example (pp 28-31): role play based on a transcript of academic speech in a study group. Raises questions of speech genres and pragmatics. Helps NNS students see how NS handle politeness and appropriateness.

Fortanet, I. (2006). Interaction in Academic Spoken English: the use of “I” and “you” in the MICASE. In E. Arno Macia, A. Soler Cervera & C. Rueda Ramos (Eds.), Information technology in languages for specific purposes. New York: Springer.

Qualitative/quantitative study. Quantitative study of occurrences of the two pronouns in MICASE, Qualitative corpus B 5 lectures in MICASE for referents and discourse functions. No noticeable difference between I and you in MICASE but monologic speech had higher % of you and dialogic used I more.

Aull, L. (2015). First-year university writing: a corpus-based study with implications for pedagogy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 4 provides detailed results and explanations of corpus analyses. Chapter 5 contains several extended examples of pedagogical applications.

Pedagogical applications

The field of EAP (English for Academic Purposes) has led the way in developing pedagogical applications of corpus analyses. See in particular, work by John Swales, Ken Hyland, Lynne Flowerdew, and their colleagues.

There has been less work specifically targeting college composition, but see Laura Aull, Zac Lancaster, Daniel Kies, Sandra Kies.

Laura Aull’s book contains very clear guidelines on using the findings of corpus analysis and actually doing corpus analyses in the classroom.

The teaching learning cycle (Presentation –> analysis/modeling –> student practice –> reflection) provides a framework for scaffolded learning of written genres such as the academic essay.

Aull provides an assignment model (pp 146-152).

Pre-analysis discussion using questions designed to deconstruct generic and rhetorical requirements of the assignment prompt.
Analysis of the genre or sub-genre (in this case, the essay introduction) using

(a) qualitative analysis (based on Swales CARS model of the moves in academic research article introductions)

(b) corpus linguistic tools used to investigate the frequency patterns of particular linguistic features, for example:

1. Markers of argumentative scope (e.g. first person and personal evidence)

2. Markers of certainty (e.g. hedges and boosters)

3. Reformulation markers (e.g. that is)

4. Transition markers indicating concession, counters, additions, sequencing etc.).

Reflection. After writing their own essay drafts, students return to discuss initial questions related to genre, prompt and language use, noting patterns they observed in analysis of their own texts compared with texts by expert writers. What do these differences tell them about generic/rhetorical expectations and what to focus on in their own writing.

Adaptations

The model can be expanded to many other linguistic feature, for example, personal pronouns, reporting verbs, use of abstract nouns from the AWL.

Use published research findings, do your own analyses, or get students to explore text features themselves using free software such as Papyr.com, AntConc or COCA (See Swales and Lee’s account of working with PhD students on their own concordances).

References

Aull, L. (2015). First-year university writing: a corpus-based study with implications for pedagogy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Biber, D., Conrad, S.M., Reppen, R., Byrd, R.P. , Helt, P., Clark, V., Cortes, V. , Csomay, E., Urzua, A. (2004). Representing Language Use in the University: Analysis of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. TOEFL Monograph Series. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

Flowerdew, L. (2005). An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: Countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies. English for Specific Purposes. 24 (3), 321-332.

Sinclair, J. Developing linguistic corpora: a guide to guide to good practice.

McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies. London: Routledge.