This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing chang... more This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory education in England. We find that the received model needs elaborating in a number of important ways. Specifically: 1) The average frequency of words in the repertoire used by older children is no lower than that of younger children. However, younger children's writing is characterized by extensive repetition of high frequency verbs and adjectives and of low frequency nouns (the latter being a product of a focus on entities which are rarely discussed in adult writing). The role of repetition in this finding implies that lexical sophistication is inseparable from lexical diversity, a construct which is usually treated as distinct. 2) Younger children's writing shows a preference for fiction-like vocabulary over academic-like vocabulary. As they mature, children come to make greater use of academic vocabulary in both their literary and non-literary writing, though this increase is greatest in their non-literary writing. Use of fiction vocabulary remains constant across year groups but decreases sharply in non- literary writing, showing an enhanced sense of register appropriateness. This development of register appropriate word use can be captured by relatively simple frequency-based measures that could readily be employed by teachers and researchers to track writers' development in this aspect of word use.
Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon ... more Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon and each model proposed so far has highlighted different aspects of lexical processing. What they have in common is the fact that their depictions rely on single lexical items and paradigmatic relations come to the fore in their explanations. Hoey's lexical priming theory (2005) tries to shed light on the issue of collocational processing in the internal lexicon from a cognitive and psycholinguistic perspective and its importance for our overall creative language production. A number of psycholinguistic studies have tested Hoey's theory as it relates to English, but work in other languages is limited. The present study broadens the scope of work in this area by investigating whether collocational priming also holds for speakers of Turkish. Furthermore, the possible influence of frequency and part of speech on collocational priming is scrutinized by exploring the correlations between response times in the priming experiment and these independent variables. The findings revealed a significant collocational priming effect for Turkish L1 users, in line with Hoey's claims. The regression analysis indicated frequency and part of speech as important predictors of processing duration. The correlation analysis also showed significant correlations between the response times and both word and collocational frequency. A tentative mental lexicon framework is proposed based on the findings of this research.
1. Abstract This study evaluates how well the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) pre... more 1. Abstract This study evaluates how well the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) predicts students' performance in a pre-university EAP programme, how much progress students make on the EAP programme in terms of PTE Academic scores, and what individual differences influence their performance. PTE Academic is shown to be a relatively good predictor of student performance, with overall correlations of rs = .58 between pre-programme PTE Academic scores and performance in end-of-programme assessments. This predictive relationship was shown to be relatively constant across a wide range of student variables. Over the ten-week programme, students improved their PTE Academic scores by between 2.5 (for speaking) and 5.5 (for reading) points. This is in line with findings from previous studies which have measured gains in terms of IELTS bands. Important variables influencing gain scores were the age at which students had started learning English (late starters improved the most), the amount of extra-curricular reading done during the programme and attitudes towards the PTE Academic test. 2. Introduction Students who speak English as a second language make up a large, and increasing, proportion of the UK university student population. Many institutions provide intensive programmes in English for Academic Purposes for applicants whose English language proficiency is deemed not to be sufficient for direct entry to particular degree programmes. It is essential that these institutions (and the higher education institutions which they serve) are able to make informed judgements about the extent to which particular applicants are likely to benefit from particular EAP programmes and the length and type of programme they are likely to need to attend before commencing their degrees. In most cases, such judgements are made on the basis of widely-available academically-oriented proficiency tests, such as the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic). It is therefore important to determine: 1) whether and how such tests are able to predict applicants' degree of achievement on an intensive EAP course; 2) the extent to which applicants can be expected to reach the levels of proficiency higher educational institutions require for entry to degree programmes by engaging in a particular EAP course; and 3) how and why the answers to 1) and 2) vary across applicants. This study aims to provide answers to these questions for one particular EAP programme with regard to PTE Academic.
This is an overview of a new ESRC-funded project currently being undertaken at the University of ... more This is an overview of a new ESRC-funded project currently being undertaken at the University of Exeter by Phil Durrant, Debra Myhill and Mark Brenchley. Up-to-date information about the project can be found at our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/growthingrammar/
This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in ... more This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in successful university study writing. Overall, levels of use of AVL items are high, and increase as students progress through the years of undergraduate and taught postgraduate study, suggesting that it may be a useful resource. However, significant variation is found across text types and disciplines. While the former is relatively minor, the latter is extensive, suggesting the list is more relevant to some student writers than others. An analysis by items indicates that around half of the words on the list are used very little. Moreover, the items which are frequent differ across disciplines. However, a small core of 427 items was found to be frequent across 90% of disciplines. This suggests that a generic productive academic vocabulary does exist, but that it is smaller in scope than the full Academic Vocabulary List.
This chapter describes a study which aims to understand the socio-economic factors that motivate ... more This chapter describes a study which aims to understand the socio-economic factors that motivate Iranian university students to learn English. Drawing on the notions of international posture, ideal self, and imagined communities, we describe how the Iranian political context has increased students’ desire to develop their English in order to enhance their career prospects, to be recognized as members of the international community, and to contribute to the development of their country.
This paper describes disciplinary variation in university students’ writing, as it is reflected i... more This paper describes disciplinary variation in university students’ writing, as it is reflected in the use of recurrent four-word sequences. In contrast to previous studies, disciplinary categories are not assumed at the outset of the analysis, but rather emerge from an initial analysis of variation across all writers in the corpus. Variation is presented in the form of a visual map representing degrees of similarity and difference between individual writers. Emergent disciplinary groupings are then used as the basis for a qualitative analysis of distinctive lexical bundles. Analysis reveals four main disciplinary groupings. A primary distinction appears between hard (science/technology) and soft (humanities/social sciences) subjects, with two further groupings (life sciences and commerce) being intermediate between these two. Evidence is also found of cross-group disciplines, which draw on a variety of influences, and of particular disciplines which are internally heterogeneous. A qualitative analysis of bundles which are distinctive of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines is presented in order to characterize the discourse functions which mark these categories.
Tests of second language learners’ knowledge of collocation have lacked a principled strategy for... more Tests of second language learners’ knowledge of collocation have lacked a principled strategy for item selection, making claims about learners’ knowledge beyond the particular collocations tested difficult to evaluate. Corpus frequency may offer a good basis for item selection, if a reliable relationship can be demonstrated between frequency and learner knowledge. However, such a relationship is difficult to establish satisfactorily, given the small number of items and narrow range of test-takers involved in any individual study. In this study, a meta-analysis is used to determine the correlation between learner knowledge and frequency data across nineteen previously-reported tests. Frequency is shown to correlate moderately with knowledge, but the strength of this correlation varies widely across corpora. Strength of association measures (such as mutual information) do not to correlate with learner knowledge. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for collocation testing and models of collocation learning.
This paper examines the extent to which different groups of university students have shared vocab... more This paper examines the extent to which different groups of university students have shared vocabulary needs. Previous research in this area is limited in that it: 1) has focused on items from Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000), which is skewed toward certain disciplines, and focuses only on reading needs; 2) has not investigated variation across levels of study; 3) creates a possibly false dichotomy between generic and discipline-specific vocabulary. The intermediate position - that broad groups of students may have similar vocabulary needs - is not considered. This paper aims to further our understanding of variation in academic vocabulary by: 1) analyzing the extent to which student writing across disciplines and levels of study draws on generic or specialized vocabulary, and 2) identifying clusters of student groups with shared vocabulary needs. It finds substantial variation between disciplines, which is only slightly lessened when related disciplines are grouped together. Most disciplines are relatively internally homogeneous, and so good candidates for teaching units, though the vocabulary of masters students often diverges considerably from that of undergraduates.
This study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a languag... more This study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a language with a rich agglutinating morphology, can be described as formulaic. It is found that many prototypically formulaic phenomena previously attested at the multi-word level in English – frequent co-occurrence of specific elements, fixed ‘bundles’ of elements, and associations between lexis and grammar – also play an important role at the morphological level in Turkish. It is argued that current psycholinguistic models of agglutinative morphology need to be complexified to incorporate such patterns. Conclusions are also drawn for the practice of Turkish as a Foreign Language teaching and for the methodology of Turkish corpus linguistics.
There is currently much interest in creating pedagogically-oriented descriptions of formulaic lan... more There is currently much interest in creating pedagogically-oriented descriptions of formulaic language. Research in this area has typically taken what we call a ‘form-first’ approach, in which formulas are identified as the most frequent recurrent forms in a relevant corpus. While this research continues to yield valuable results, the present paper argues that much can also be gained by taking a ‘function-first’ approach, in which a corpus is first annotated for communicative functions and formulas are then identified as the recurrent patterns associated with each function. We demonstrate this approach through a comparative analysis of introductions to student essays and research articles. Focusing on one particularly common communicative function, the analysis demonstrates that (1) this function is more common in student essays than in articles; (2) both the choice to use the function and the choice of linguistic forms that realize the function vary across subject areas in research articles, but not in student essays; (3) research articles tend to be more formulaic in expressing the function than student essays; (4) some parts of the forms used are highly formulaic, while others are more open. The key formulas are described and suggestions made regarding their pedagogical presentation.
Words which frequently co-occur in language (‘collocations’) are often thought to be independentl... more Words which frequently co-occur in language (‘collocations’) are often thought to be independently stored in speakers’ minds. This idea is tested here through experiments investigating the extent to which corpus-identified collocations exhibit mental ‘priming’ in a group of native speakers. Collocational priming is found to exist. However, in an experiment which aimed to exclude higher-order mental processes, and focus instead on the ‘automatic’ processes which are thought to best reflect the organisation of the mental lexicon, priming is restricted to collocations which are also psychological associates. While the former finding suggests that collocations found in a large corpus are likely to have psychological reality, the latter suggests that we may need to elaborate our models of how they are represented.
Formulaic language is widely recognised to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic langu... more Formulaic language is widely recognised to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim that adult second language learners take an essentially non-formulaic approach to language learning, analysing their input into individual words and not retaining information about what words appear together. If the second model is right, it represents a crucial difference between child first and adult second language learning. This ‘non-formulaic’ model is tested here through a lab-based study of collocation learning. Our findings indicate that, contrary to the model, adult second language learners do retain information about what words appear together in their input. This suggests that any shortfall in non-natives’ knowledge of collocational associations between words is due to inadequate input, rather than a non-nativelike approach to learning. The study also examines the effects of different forms of repetition on collocation acquisition and draws conclusions regarding pedagogical activities for learning.
A number of researchers are currently attempting to create listings of important collocations for... more A number of researchers are currently attempting to create listings of important collocations for students of EAP. However, so far these attempts have 1) failed to include positionally-variable collocations, and 2) not taken sufficient account of variation across disciplines. The present paper describes the creation of one listing of positionally-variable academic collocations and evaluates the extent to which it is likely to be useful to students from across a wide range of disciplines. A number of key findings emerge. First, cross-disciplinary collocations differ in type from the collocations on which most researchers have traditionally focused in that they tend not to be combinations of two lexical words, but rather pairings of one lexical and one grammatical word. Second, most of the words which are found in academic collocations are not found on Coxhead’s influential Academic Word List. This, it is argued, reflects a serious methodological weakness in Coxhead’s listing. Third, the vocabulary needs of students in the arts and humanities are characteristically different from those of students in other disciplines. Researchers and teachers therefore need to deal with these learners separately. The paper finishes by making a number of recommendations for future developments in this area.
Usage-based models claim that first language learning is based on the frequency-based analysis of... more Usage-based models claim that first language learning is based on the frequency-based analysis of memorised phrases. It is not clear though, whether adult second language learning works in the same way. It has been claimed that non-native language lacks idiomatic formulas, suggesting that learners neglect phrases, focusing instead on orthographic words. While a number of studies challenge the claim that non-native language lacks formulaicity, these studies have two important shortcomings: they fail to take account of appropriate frequency information and they pool the writing of different learners in ways that may mask individual differences. Using methodologies which avoid these problems, this study found that non-native writers rely heavily on high-frequency collocations, but that they underuse less frequent, strongly associated collocations (items which are probably highly salient for native speakers). These findings are consistent with usage-based models of acquisition while accounting for the impression that non-native writing lacks idiomatic phraseology.
This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing chang... more This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory education in England. We find that the received model needs elaborating in a number of important ways. Specifically: 1) The average frequency of words in the repertoire used by older children is no lower than that of younger children. However, younger children's writing is characterized by extensive repetition of high frequency verbs and adjectives and of low frequency nouns (the latter being a product of a focus on entities which are rarely discussed in adult writing). The role of repetition in this finding implies that lexical sophistication is inseparable from lexical diversity, a construct which is usually treated as distinct. 2) Younger children's writing shows a preference for fiction-like vocabulary over academic-like vocabulary. As they mature, children come to make greater use of academic vocabulary in both their literary and non-literary writing, though this increase is greatest in their non-literary writing. Use of fiction vocabulary remains constant across year groups but decreases sharply in non- literary writing, showing an enhanced sense of register appropriateness. This development of register appropriate word use can be captured by relatively simple frequency-based measures that could readily be employed by teachers and researchers to track writers' development in this aspect of word use.
Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon ... more Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon and each model proposed so far has highlighted different aspects of lexical processing. What they have in common is the fact that their depictions rely on single lexical items and paradigmatic relations come to the fore in their explanations. Hoey's lexical priming theory (2005) tries to shed light on the issue of collocational processing in the internal lexicon from a cognitive and psycholinguistic perspective and its importance for our overall creative language production. A number of psycholinguistic studies have tested Hoey's theory as it relates to English, but work in other languages is limited. The present study broadens the scope of work in this area by investigating whether collocational priming also holds for speakers of Turkish. Furthermore, the possible influence of frequency and part of speech on collocational priming is scrutinized by exploring the correlations between response times in the priming experiment and these independent variables. The findings revealed a significant collocational priming effect for Turkish L1 users, in line with Hoey's claims. The regression analysis indicated frequency and part of speech as important predictors of processing duration. The correlation analysis also showed significant correlations between the response times and both word and collocational frequency. A tentative mental lexicon framework is proposed based on the findings of this research.
1. Abstract This study evaluates how well the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) pre... more 1. Abstract This study evaluates how well the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) predicts students' performance in a pre-university EAP programme, how much progress students make on the EAP programme in terms of PTE Academic scores, and what individual differences influence their performance. PTE Academic is shown to be a relatively good predictor of student performance, with overall correlations of rs = .58 between pre-programme PTE Academic scores and performance in end-of-programme assessments. This predictive relationship was shown to be relatively constant across a wide range of student variables. Over the ten-week programme, students improved their PTE Academic scores by between 2.5 (for speaking) and 5.5 (for reading) points. This is in line with findings from previous studies which have measured gains in terms of IELTS bands. Important variables influencing gain scores were the age at which students had started learning English (late starters improved the most), the amount of extra-curricular reading done during the programme and attitudes towards the PTE Academic test. 2. Introduction Students who speak English as a second language make up a large, and increasing, proportion of the UK university student population. Many institutions provide intensive programmes in English for Academic Purposes for applicants whose English language proficiency is deemed not to be sufficient for direct entry to particular degree programmes. It is essential that these institutions (and the higher education institutions which they serve) are able to make informed judgements about the extent to which particular applicants are likely to benefit from particular EAP programmes and the length and type of programme they are likely to need to attend before commencing their degrees. In most cases, such judgements are made on the basis of widely-available academically-oriented proficiency tests, such as the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic). It is therefore important to determine: 1) whether and how such tests are able to predict applicants' degree of achievement on an intensive EAP course; 2) the extent to which applicants can be expected to reach the levels of proficiency higher educational institutions require for entry to degree programmes by engaging in a particular EAP course; and 3) how and why the answers to 1) and 2) vary across applicants. This study aims to provide answers to these questions for one particular EAP programme with regard to PTE Academic.
This is an overview of a new ESRC-funded project currently being undertaken at the University of ... more This is an overview of a new ESRC-funded project currently being undertaken at the University of Exeter by Phil Durrant, Debra Myhill and Mark Brenchley. Up-to-date information about the project can be found at our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/growthingrammar/
This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in ... more This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in successful university study writing. Overall, levels of use of AVL items are high, and increase as students progress through the years of undergraduate and taught postgraduate study, suggesting that it may be a useful resource. However, significant variation is found across text types and disciplines. While the former is relatively minor, the latter is extensive, suggesting the list is more relevant to some student writers than others. An analysis by items indicates that around half of the words on the list are used very little. Moreover, the items which are frequent differ across disciplines. However, a small core of 427 items was found to be frequent across 90% of disciplines. This suggests that a generic productive academic vocabulary does exist, but that it is smaller in scope than the full Academic Vocabulary List.
This chapter describes a study which aims to understand the socio-economic factors that motivate ... more This chapter describes a study which aims to understand the socio-economic factors that motivate Iranian university students to learn English. Drawing on the notions of international posture, ideal self, and imagined communities, we describe how the Iranian political context has increased students’ desire to develop their English in order to enhance their career prospects, to be recognized as members of the international community, and to contribute to the development of their country.
This paper describes disciplinary variation in university students’ writing, as it is reflected i... more This paper describes disciplinary variation in university students’ writing, as it is reflected in the use of recurrent four-word sequences. In contrast to previous studies, disciplinary categories are not assumed at the outset of the analysis, but rather emerge from an initial analysis of variation across all writers in the corpus. Variation is presented in the form of a visual map representing degrees of similarity and difference between individual writers. Emergent disciplinary groupings are then used as the basis for a qualitative analysis of distinctive lexical bundles. Analysis reveals four main disciplinary groupings. A primary distinction appears between hard (science/technology) and soft (humanities/social sciences) subjects, with two further groupings (life sciences and commerce) being intermediate between these two. Evidence is also found of cross-group disciplines, which draw on a variety of influences, and of particular disciplines which are internally heterogeneous. A qualitative analysis of bundles which are distinctive of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines is presented in order to characterize the discourse functions which mark these categories.
Tests of second language learners’ knowledge of collocation have lacked a principled strategy for... more Tests of second language learners’ knowledge of collocation have lacked a principled strategy for item selection, making claims about learners’ knowledge beyond the particular collocations tested difficult to evaluate. Corpus frequency may offer a good basis for item selection, if a reliable relationship can be demonstrated between frequency and learner knowledge. However, such a relationship is difficult to establish satisfactorily, given the small number of items and narrow range of test-takers involved in any individual study. In this study, a meta-analysis is used to determine the correlation between learner knowledge and frequency data across nineteen previously-reported tests. Frequency is shown to correlate moderately with knowledge, but the strength of this correlation varies widely across corpora. Strength of association measures (such as mutual information) do not to correlate with learner knowledge. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for collocation testing and models of collocation learning.
This paper examines the extent to which different groups of university students have shared vocab... more This paper examines the extent to which different groups of university students have shared vocabulary needs. Previous research in this area is limited in that it: 1) has focused on items from Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000), which is skewed toward certain disciplines, and focuses only on reading needs; 2) has not investigated variation across levels of study; 3) creates a possibly false dichotomy between generic and discipline-specific vocabulary. The intermediate position - that broad groups of students may have similar vocabulary needs - is not considered. This paper aims to further our understanding of variation in academic vocabulary by: 1) analyzing the extent to which student writing across disciplines and levels of study draws on generic or specialized vocabulary, and 2) identifying clusters of student groups with shared vocabulary needs. It finds substantial variation between disciplines, which is only slightly lessened when related disciplines are grouped together. Most disciplines are relatively internally homogeneous, and so good candidates for teaching units, though the vocabulary of masters students often diverges considerably from that of undergraduates.
This study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a languag... more This study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a language with a rich agglutinating morphology, can be described as formulaic. It is found that many prototypically formulaic phenomena previously attested at the multi-word level in English – frequent co-occurrence of specific elements, fixed ‘bundles’ of elements, and associations between lexis and grammar – also play an important role at the morphological level in Turkish. It is argued that current psycholinguistic models of agglutinative morphology need to be complexified to incorporate such patterns. Conclusions are also drawn for the practice of Turkish as a Foreign Language teaching and for the methodology of Turkish corpus linguistics.
There is currently much interest in creating pedagogically-oriented descriptions of formulaic lan... more There is currently much interest in creating pedagogically-oriented descriptions of formulaic language. Research in this area has typically taken what we call a ‘form-first’ approach, in which formulas are identified as the most frequent recurrent forms in a relevant corpus. While this research continues to yield valuable results, the present paper argues that much can also be gained by taking a ‘function-first’ approach, in which a corpus is first annotated for communicative functions and formulas are then identified as the recurrent patterns associated with each function. We demonstrate this approach through a comparative analysis of introductions to student essays and research articles. Focusing on one particularly common communicative function, the analysis demonstrates that (1) this function is more common in student essays than in articles; (2) both the choice to use the function and the choice of linguistic forms that realize the function vary across subject areas in research articles, but not in student essays; (3) research articles tend to be more formulaic in expressing the function than student essays; (4) some parts of the forms used are highly formulaic, while others are more open. The key formulas are described and suggestions made regarding their pedagogical presentation.
Words which frequently co-occur in language (‘collocations’) are often thought to be independentl... more Words which frequently co-occur in language (‘collocations’) are often thought to be independently stored in speakers’ minds. This idea is tested here through experiments investigating the extent to which corpus-identified collocations exhibit mental ‘priming’ in a group of native speakers. Collocational priming is found to exist. However, in an experiment which aimed to exclude higher-order mental processes, and focus instead on the ‘automatic’ processes which are thought to best reflect the organisation of the mental lexicon, priming is restricted to collocations which are also psychological associates. While the former finding suggests that collocations found in a large corpus are likely to have psychological reality, the latter suggests that we may need to elaborate our models of how they are represented.
Formulaic language is widely recognised to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic langu... more Formulaic language is widely recognised to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim that adult second language learners take an essentially non-formulaic approach to language learning, analysing their input into individual words and not retaining information about what words appear together. If the second model is right, it represents a crucial difference between child first and adult second language learning. This ‘non-formulaic’ model is tested here through a lab-based study of collocation learning. Our findings indicate that, contrary to the model, adult second language learners do retain information about what words appear together in their input. This suggests that any shortfall in non-natives’ knowledge of collocational associations between words is due to inadequate input, rather than a non-nativelike approach to learning. The study also examines the effects of different forms of repetition on collocation acquisition and draws conclusions regarding pedagogical activities for learning.
A number of researchers are currently attempting to create listings of important collocations for... more A number of researchers are currently attempting to create listings of important collocations for students of EAP. However, so far these attempts have 1) failed to include positionally-variable collocations, and 2) not taken sufficient account of variation across disciplines. The present paper describes the creation of one listing of positionally-variable academic collocations and evaluates the extent to which it is likely to be useful to students from across a wide range of disciplines. A number of key findings emerge. First, cross-disciplinary collocations differ in type from the collocations on which most researchers have traditionally focused in that they tend not to be combinations of two lexical words, but rather pairings of one lexical and one grammatical word. Second, most of the words which are found in academic collocations are not found on Coxhead’s influential Academic Word List. This, it is argued, reflects a serious methodological weakness in Coxhead’s listing. Third, the vocabulary needs of students in the arts and humanities are characteristically different from those of students in other disciplines. Researchers and teachers therefore need to deal with these learners separately. The paper finishes by making a number of recommendations for future developments in this area.
Usage-based models claim that first language learning is based on the frequency-based analysis of... more Usage-based models claim that first language learning is based on the frequency-based analysis of memorised phrases. It is not clear though, whether adult second language learning works in the same way. It has been claimed that non-native language lacks idiomatic formulas, suggesting that learners neglect phrases, focusing instead on orthographic words. While a number of studies challenge the claim that non-native language lacks formulaicity, these studies have two important shortcomings: they fail to take account of appropriate frequency information and they pool the writing of different learners in ways that may mask individual differences. Using methodologies which avoid these problems, this study found that non-native writers rely heavily on high-frequency collocations, but that they underuse less frequent, strongly associated collocations (items which are probably highly salient for native speakers). These findings are consistent with usage-based models of acquisition while accounting for the impression that non-native writing lacks idiomatic phraseology.
One of the key challenges facing teachers, students and researchers of EAP is the variety that ex... more One of the key challenges facing teachers, students and researchers of EAP is the variety that exists within ‘academic English’. Language use can vary widely between different disciplines, different textual genres, different participants and different media. While it is unrealistic to expect EAP professionals to master all of the forms that academic language can take, we do need a general understanding of how language use changes across these variables, what stays the same, and what drives variation.
Corpus linguistics provides excellent tools for understanding such variation, and this presentation will discuss one attempt to use corpus methods for this purpose. Drawing on texts from the BAWE corpus, it describes a study of variation in the use of recurrent four-word sequences in university students’ writing. In contrast to previous studies of disciplinary variation, disciplinary categories are not assumed at the outset of the analysis, but rather emerge from an initial analysis of variation across all writers in the corpus. This is presented in the form of a visual map representing degrees of similarity and difference between individual writers. Emergent disciplinary groupings are then used as the basis for a qualitative analysis of distinctive lexical bundles.
The analysis reveals four main disciplinary groupings. A primary distinction appears between hard (science/technology) and soft (humanities/social sciences) subjects, with two further groupings (life sciences and commerce) being intermediate between these two. Evidence is also found of cross-group disciplines, which draw on a variety of influences, and of particular disciplines which are internally heterogeneous. Further, qualitative, analysis provides a functional characterization of the bundles which are distinctive of each disciplinary grouping and provides insights into how differences in language use reflect differing approaches to academic work.
NB. See the link to the BALEAP site below for the podcast of an interview related to this presentation
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Corpus linguistics provides excellent tools for understanding such variation, and this presentation will discuss one attempt to use corpus methods for this purpose. Drawing on texts from the BAWE corpus, it describes a study of variation in the use of recurrent four-word sequences in university students’ writing. In contrast to previous studies of disciplinary variation, disciplinary categories are not assumed at the outset of the analysis, but rather emerge from an initial analysis of variation across all writers in the corpus. This is presented in the form of a visual map representing degrees of similarity and difference between individual writers. Emergent disciplinary groupings are then used as the basis for a qualitative analysis of distinctive lexical bundles.
The analysis reveals four main disciplinary groupings. A primary distinction appears between hard (science/technology) and soft (humanities/social sciences) subjects, with two further groupings (life sciences and commerce) being intermediate between these two. Evidence is also found of cross-group disciplines, which draw on a variety of influences, and of particular disciplines which are internally heterogeneous. Further, qualitative, analysis provides a functional characterization of the bundles which are distinctive of each disciplinary grouping and provides insights into how differences in language use reflect differing approaches to academic work.
NB. See the link to the BALEAP site below for the podcast of an interview related to this presentation