Introduction

As teachers of first-year composition (FYC), we often have questions about the language our students use, questions that grow out of something that our students have written, questions that grow from our concerns about changes within the language itself, questions that originate in our professional concerns about language development, language learning, and how we might better develop curriculum, syllabi, and materials to improve our own practice as teachers.

• Has texting (or new communications technologies, or the net generally) changed the very language of our students?
• Has our students' use of English improved (or declined) as a result of the popularity of communications technologies or social media?
• Is our students' language becoming clearer, more coherent, more concise during the last generation or two?
• How has sentence structure changed in the last generation or two? If one of the goals of FYC is to move students toward writing "academic" English, have our efforts been effective?

Figure 1: AntConc in action AntConc, a tool to explore our students' language quickly and empirically for free.

Moreover, as classroom researchers — as inquisitive, aware, attentive teachers — what we learn about our our students' writing, about our students' practices, informs our decisions when we make decisions about our departments' curricula. However, we need more than anecdotal evidence to guide our choices and our recommendations. The tools of corpus linguistics can give us the resources to explore our students' work in ways that guide us toward empirically driven recommendation that we can use in our classrooms, our curricular committee meetings, and our state-wide panels developing policies for the teaching of FYC and/or communications strategies.

As (classroom) researchers, we also have an interest in a host of related (and different) questions:

• Is written language becoming more like spoken language?
• Is the writing of contemporary students better or worse than the writing of students a generation ago?

We can empirically study these questions, both as teachers and as researchers. We can use the tools of corpus linguistics (such as AntConc above) to study our students' writing so that we have empirical evidence to inform our praxis in the classroom, in our syllabi, and in our decisions as we do course and program development on our campuses.

In this workshop we will examine the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics that we can apply to our students' writing in an effort to learn more about how our students learn to write.

This workshop will introduce us to some tools, corpora, and techniques that can help us explore our students' writing. We want to focus on free software available for the most popular operating system.

Let's begin by surveying the tools available to us for learning more about how our students write (and learn).