Chapter 2 Using hands-on concordancing to teach rhetorical functions: evaluation and implications for EAP writing classes Maggie Charles This study proposes a pedagogic approach which combines discourse analysis with corpus investigation and reports on students’ feedback on the materials. Forty-nine international graduates evaluated the corpus work on a five-point scale. Results show that attitudes were generally very favourable: percentages agreeing with positive statements about the tasks ranged from 62% to 96%. The study examines the practical implications of using hands-on concordancing in large mixed-discipline EAP writing classes and concludes by proposing a three-stage set of goals for such classes on a cline of increasing corpus competence, from basic corpus awareness through corpus literacy to advanced corpus proficiency. 2.1. Introduction Although discourse analysis and corpus investigation have been seen as opposing approaches (Swales 2002), there have been significant recent advances in integrating the two, especially with regard to research on academic writing. Conrad (2002), Partington (2004) and Baker (2006) have all stressed the need for a combined approach, while Lynne Flowerdew (1998, 2002, 2005) has worked extensively on the use of corpus methods in discourse analysis, arguing that this can enhance pedagogical applications. Further illustration of this point is provided by her recent corpus analyses of the problem-solution pattern in professional and student report writing (Flowerdew, 2008). Two other recent volumes illustrate this trend in EAP research. In Biber, Connor and Upton (2007), corpus and discourse approaches are applied to the genre analysis of biochemistry and biology AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 26 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 27 research articles, while the (2009) volume edited by Charles, Pecorari and Hunston focuses specifically on research in academic writing, seeing it in terms of a cline from top-down (more discourse-analytic) to bottom-up (more corpus-based) approaches. However when we turn to research on specific pedagogical applications of corpora, there is still a tendency to focus on lexicogrammatical rather than discoursal awareness raising. The problem here is that the use of a corpus to investigate a series of individual lexicogrammatical patterns does not necessarily constitute a systematic and pedagogically valid set of course materials. Moreover, while it is certainly true that advanced EAP students need lexicogrammatical ‘fine-tuning’ (Lee and Swales 2006), they also have higher level discourse concerns. I would argue that if corpus consultation is to be incorporated routinely into the class teaching of academic writing, it must also help students to address these discourse issues. There is a need, then, for applications which integrate corpus and discourse approaches in the classroom. Charles (2007) describes an initial attempt to combine discourse and corpus work in the EAP writing class, but could not provide an assessment of the approach due to lack of data. The first aim of the present paper, then, is to examine whether the use of hands-on concordancing can be of value in raising students’ awareness and understanding of discourse features. Studies of concordancing have been reported in various EAP classroom contexts, but there is concern that its use has not so far been widely taken up (e.g. Boulton in press, 2010; Thompson 2006). One contributory factor may be that the experimental groups are likely to differ from mainstream EAP classes in certain key respects. For example, a number of studies deal with single discipline groups (Bondi 2001; Gavioli 2005; Hafner and Candlin 2007; Weber 2001), a teaching situation which may very well not pertain in many EAP courses. This homogeneity has the advantage of allowing the use of tailor-made corpora and means that classes have specific shared goals to address through corpus consultation. However, the type of corpus work reported in these situations may not be readily transferable to mixed-discipline classes. There are also several studies of groups whose discipline concerns language itself, including language majors (Chambers 2005, 2007; Kennedy and Miceli 2001) and students of translation or interpretation (Bernardini 2002; Frankenberg-Garcia 2005a). Such students are likely to be interested in the investigation and analysis of language per se and so may well find corpus work easier, or at least more engaging, than EAP students, who are predominantly non-linguists. Teaching mixed-discipline non-linguist AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 27 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM 28 Maggie Charles groups, then, raises distinct issues with regard to the type of corpus work that is feasible and useful. The prime motivation of students in such classes is instrumental: they need to improve their academic writing for degree purposes and the time available is strictly limited. It is essential, therefore, that students perceive each session to be of immediate benefit to their writing, and the class must be managed to ensure that all members achieve specific learning goals. Two studies that report on the use of corpora with mixed-discipline groups are those by Yoon and Hirvela (2004) and Lee and Swales (2006). These propose rather different roles for corpus work in the writing class. In the Yoon and Hirvela study, corpus use functioned as a supplement to language work. Two groups were investigated, intermediate and advanced, both of which had four initial corpus training sessions. Thereafter the intermediate students spent about 20 minutes on corpus activities in each class, while the advanced group were left to consult the corpus on their own. Responses indicated a less favourable attitude to corpus work in the advanced than in the intermediate group, which the authors attribute to the lack of teacher support and class-based practice. By contrast, Lee and Swales made corpus work the focus of their course, which trained a small group of six advanced-level students in corpus techniques over a period of thirteen weeks. The course culminated in participants building their own corpora and presenting individual corpus-based projects. Given this intensive input, the students became skilled and enthusiastic corpus users, but, as the authors note, the success of the approach may depend on working intensively with limited numbers of highly motivated students. The results of the above studies indicate that even advanced-level students need considerable guidance and in-class practice in order to benefit fully from corpus work, but the level of resourcing and commitment seen in the Lee and Swales study is unlikely to be available in many EAP situations. A second aim of this study, then, is to investigate whether hands-on concordancing can be used to benefit mixed-discipline classes operating under less ideal conditions, with relatively large groups and fewer class hours. This study proposes an approach which combines corpus investigation with discourse analysis in order to address both the lexicogrammatical and discourse concerns of the students. In contrast to other approaches, corpus consultation is used here in order to study rhetoric. Thus lexicogrammatical patterns are examined systematically, as realisations of the specific rhetorical function studied. Corpus work is neither the main focus of the course, as in Lee and Swales, nor is it peripheral to the class work as in Yoon and Hirvela. Rather it is one of two equally important elements of class AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 28 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 29 activity: both discourse and corpus tasks are designed to contribute to the overall aim of enhancing rhetorical awareness and competence. 2.2. Background to the study 2.2.1. The course The course described here was offered as part of Oxford University Language Centre’s programme of open-access academic writing classes for graduates. It expands and takes forward the pilot version presented in Charles (2007). Five parallel groups, each with around sixteen participants, attended one weekly two-hour session on ‘Investigating Rhetorical Functions’ for six weeks. The materials begin with discourse-based tasks to raise students’ awareness of a given function and continue with hands-on concordancing, which uses the corpora to focus on specific lexicogrammatical options for performing that function. The rhetorical functions are: Situating your research in the field; Defending your research against criticism; Portraying your professional competence; Making and modifying claims; Criticising others’ research; Making and countering arguments. The corpora consist of successful theses written by native-speakers (approximately 190,000 words in politics and 300,000 words in materials science) and were examined using the concordancer of WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004). 2.2.2. The participants The participants were international graduates or researchers. Forty-nine students completed both an initial questionnaire adapted from Yoon and Hirvela (2004), which provided information on their backgrounds and attitudes towards computer use, and a final evaluation, which asked participants to rate sixteen statements about the corpus work on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Roughly 55% were doctoral students, 41% Masters students and 4% postdoctoral researchers. Thirtythree different research fields were represented: about 33% natural sciences, 45% social sciences and 22% humanities. Twenty-one different native languages were spoken, the most frequent being Chinese (35%). All but one student liked using computers and most did so several times per day. Forty-seven percent had used a corpus before, which reflects the fact that use of the British National Corpus had been introduced in earlier courses. The majority of those students reported consulting a corpus once AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 29 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Maggie Charles 30 per week or less. Attendance was not necessarily regular: only 47% attended all six corpus sessions, another factor which may be characteristic of mainstream academic writing classes and which militates against the successful introduction of unfamiliar techniques like hands-on concordancing. It is clear that these classes were very heterogeneous, particularly in discipline, native language and experience in corpus use, and such diversity may well be characteristic of many academic writing classes. Thus, the Oxford classes provide a useful test case for two research questions. 1. Can corpus work help raise students’ awareness and understanding of discourse features? 2. Can hands-on concordancing be used to benefit this type of academic writing class, characterised by heterogeneity, large size, irregular attendance and limited class time? 2.3. An example of classroom procedure: Criticising the work of other researchers One difficulty often mentioned by students is that of making an acceptable criticism of other researchers’ work. They are frequently urged to ‘be critical’, but given little specific guidance on how to achieve this. It seemed likely, therefore, that a combination of discourse and corpus work would enable students to discover some of the rhetorical and lexicogrammatical patterns associated with this function. The discourse session begins by focusing on two extracts from successful theses (Extracts A and B). Students are asked to underline the linguistic features that construct the criticism and, in pairs, to compare and contrast the extracts, commenting on their acceptability and persuasive effect. Extract A makes an overt attack rather than a reasoned argument. Extract B instead includes a positive evaluation of other researchers’ views and a concession before giving the writer’s criticism, signalled in each case by but. The purpose of this task is not just to illustrate how criticisms can be made, but to help students reflect on their own attitudes to criticising others’ work and the norms of their discipline in this regard. Extract A Statements such as a bone collagen δ13C value of −18.07‰ implies a dietary content of 16% C4 plants (White & Schwarcz 1994) have been made and accepted as possible conclusions. The assumptions on which this AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 30 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 31 statement is based is that all C3 and C4 plants can be assigned fixed single δ13C values . . . This is a gross oversimplification and disregards all the known data on the wide variation in plant isotopic values . . . Extract B There exists an important strand of thought concerning state socialization that limits the scope of investigation to processes affecting individuals within states (see Luard: 59–60; Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990: 289–290). But states are not merely aggregates of individuals. States are corporate actors, possessed of centralized administrative organs. It is true that state policy is made by individuals, but these individuals are subject to pressure from domestic interests . . . In the concordancing part of the class, the students focus on two-part rhetorical patterns similar to those identified in Extract B, in which the writer acknowledges the work of another researcher before criticising it. They are asked to perform corpus searches on but, however and though with (19* in the context. As the corpora were compiled in the 1990s, this retrieves citations which occur within the context of a contrasting statement signalled by the conjunction. In each concordance, this provides students with several examples of the rhetorical pattern studied. Thus in the materials science corpus, the concordance for but in the context of (19* retrieves 19 lines, of which about half show evidence of this pattern. Part of this concordance appears below: 1. . . . Venables and Maher (1996). Their work successfully imaged ionimplanted p+n-junctions, but did not report the observation of any contrast in similar n+p-junctions. 2. Humphreys (1993) and Gater (1994) studied the grain boundaries of MA6000 but failed to find any evidence of carbides. 3. The early parameterisation of Chadi (1979c) described the band structure rather well, and had the correct separation of Es and Ep, but gave poor elastic constants. 4. A similar insensitivity of SE-imaging was reported, but not explained, by Venables and Maher (1996). 5. Norenberg, Bowler and Briggs (1997) also found an increase in the amount of c(4x4) with Ga exposure, but were unable to measure the Ga coverage in Auger. AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 31 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Maggie Charles 32 Focusing questions are given to help students notice features of the rhetorical function studied, thereby providing some pedagogical mediation of the concordance data (Flowerdew 2009). Students are asked to identify which lines construct criticisms and how they are signalled (e.g. but, negation, negative evaluation). They are also asked to note any features which soften the effect of the criticisms (e.g. factive verbs, positive evaluation). The aim of the task is to draw students’ attention to a way of mitigating the effect of criticism by first indicating what the other researcher has achieved before drawing attention to limitations or flaws. In pairs, students discuss their findings and the class ends with a whole-group report-back session. Paper versions of the concordances are provided so that students have a record of the data, and homework is to write a short criticism of others’ work in their own field. The other rhetorical functions are dealt with in a similar way. Each session focuses on a single function, with initial discourse work leading on to subsequent corpus consultation. 2.4. Results of the students’ evaluations The results of the students’ evaluations appear in Table 2.1 below. Table 2.1 Results of the students’ evaluation questionnaire Statement about the corpus work Strongly disagree Somewhat disagree Neither agree nor disagree Somewhat agree Strongly agree 1. In general, working with the concordances helped me to learn about the rhetorical functions. 0% 4% 6% 55% 35% 2. Working with the concordances helped me to understand how the rhetorical functions are used. 0% 2% 12% 49% 37% 3. Working with the concordances helped me to learn how the rhetorical functions are expressed. 0% 4% 2% 57% 36% AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 32 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 33 4. Working with the concordances helped me to learn the grammar of the rhetorical functions. 0% 0% 15% 52% 33% 5. Working with the concordances helped me to learn the vocabulary of the rhetorical functions. 0% 8% 6% 47% 39% 6. Working with the concordances was a useful supplement to working with the texts. 0% 4% 10% 40% 46% 7. Working with the concordances was interesting. 6% 6% 14% 35% 39% 8. Working with the concordances helped me to use the rhetorical functions in my own writing. 0% 4% 22% 49% 24% 9. Working with the concordances helped me to learn other useful aspects of academic writing, apart from the rhetorical functions. 0% 2% 35% 39% 24% 10. Working with the concordances made me more aware of the rhetorical functions in my reading. 0% 6% 6% 46% 42% 11. It was easy to perform the searches using the WordSmith Concordance program. 0% 18% 20% 35% 27% 12. Analysing the concordance lines was difficult because of the language. 9% 54% 28% 4% 4% (Continued) AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 33 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Maggie Charles 34 Table 2.1 (Cont’d) Statement about the corpus work Strongly disagree Somewhat disagree Neither agree nor disagree Somewhat agree Strongly agree 13. Analysing the concordance lines took too much time because there was a lot of data. 20% 22% 22% 24% 10% 14. I intend to use a corpus (e.g. the British National Corpus) for help with my English in the future. 0% 6% 10% 29% 54% 15. I would like to use corpora in an English course in the future. 2% 6% 14% 37% 41% 16. I would recommend other international students to use a corpus for help with their English. 0% 4% 0% 41% 55% The results of the final questionnaire show that attitudes towards the corpus work were generally very favourable, although it was rather disappointing that the numbers of those who strongly supported corpus work were somewhat low, with an average of 38%. Nonetheless, taking an average of those who somewhat agree or strongly agree with the positive statements about corpus work gives the figure of 82%, showing that students considered working with concordances to be useful and worthwhile. In providing the following brief overview, I now combine the categories ‘somewhat’ and ‘strongly’ and refer to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’. Ninety percent or over agreed that concordances helped them learn about rhetorical functions and how they are expressed and would recommend other international students to use a corpus for help with their English. Between 80% and 90% agreed that working with the concordances was a useful supplement to working with the texts and intend to use a corpus in the future; it also helped them to understand how rhetorical functions are used, to learn the grammar and vocabulary associated with them and to become more aware of them in their reading. Between 70% and 80% agreed that working with concordances was interesting, that it helped them to use rhetorical functions in AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 34 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 35 their own writing and that they would like to use corpora in a future English class. In answer to the research questions, then, these students considered that concordancing could help them learn features of discourse, and the positive feedback suggests that this type of corpus work can be beneficial even in large heterogeneous groups. Lower percentages were recorded for agreeing that working with concordances helped students learn other aspects of academic writing (63%) and that it was easy to perform the searches (62%). There was also relatively low disagreement with the negative statements that analysing the concordance lines was difficult because of the language (63%) and that it took too much time because there was a lot of data (42%). I now discuss in more detail the students’ evaluations of the four statements which evoked a less favourable response, as these raise wider issues relevant to incorporating concordancing into mainstream academic writing courses. 2.5. Discussion 2.5.1. ‘Working with the concordances helped me to learn other useful aspects of academic writing, apart from the rhetorical functions’ The relatively low percentage of those who agreed with this statement (63%) was somewhat surprising as it has been claimed that corpus work has beneficial effects that extend beyond the immediate task performed (Aston 2001; Johns 1991). There are several possible reasons for this result. First, it may simply be that the students had not considered this possibility, an explanation supported by the relatively high figure for those who neither agree nor disagree (35%). It is also possible that the positive effects of corpus work may be more long term and general (Boulton and Tyne 2008). It may be unrealistic, then, to expect students to notice such benefits after only six sessions. A further possibility, however, is that students are so focused on the assigned task that they do not notice other useful features of the concordance lines. This raises the issue of the extent to which corpus work should be planned into a course or incidental to it. The ‘incidentalism’ of much corpus work has been criticised, among others by Swales (2002) and Lee and Swales (2006), while other researchers, most notably Bernardini (2000), have viewed what they term ‘serendipitous’ learning as a positive advantage. I have argued elsewhere (Charles 2007) that the use of controlled searches at the early stages of corpus work has the advantage of AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 35 10/15/2010 5:55:55 PM 36 Maggie Charles providing a clear, shared focus for the class, making it possible for the teacher to check learning and for students to gain a sense of achievement by completing set tasks. Clearly, however, each group of learners has different pedagogic needs, and care must be taken not to inhibit students from pursuing ‘triggered queries’ (Flowerdew 2009), that is, individual lines of enquiry arising from the data. 2.5.2. ‘Analysing the concordance lines was difficult because of the language’ Another issue of concern is the language of the concordances. Nine percent agreed with the statement above, and only sixty-three percent disagreed, indicating a somewhat negative evaluation of the language. Difficulties with the language of concordances have been pointed out by others (Aston 1997; Kennedy and Miceli 2001), but usually in the context of work with large corpora, or with intermediate level students. Here, however, the corpora were small and the students at advanced level. Language problems, then, may be due to the content of the corpora. Although about half these students were already used to reading short extracts from both corpora, they may have found it too challenging to be confronted with several examples of specialist language in an area not their own. This raises the important issue of what corpus to use. In terms of genre, the corpora used here consist of theses rather than research articles, that is, student rather than expert texts. I would argue that a thesis corpus is particularly appropriate for use with graduates, as it provides exemplars of the texts that the students have to write. In mixed groups of Masters and doctoral students it cannot be assumed that the research article is a target genre for all. Furthermore, as there are important differences between genres even within the same discipline (Hyland 2008; Koutsantoni 2006), it may not always be appropriate to consult a research article corpus when the goal is to write a thesis. Perhaps even more important is the decision as to disciplinary content. Disciplinary characteristics are vital to the construction of appropriate academic texts (see Hyland 2000) and there is also considerable variation within disciplines (Thompson 2005). However, an individual class is likely to contain students from a number of different fields. Moreover, the disciplinary composition of classes will probably vary each year and many students have fields of enquiry which are interdisciplinary. Thus it would be impractical to provide a corpus appropriate to each student. Lee and AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 36 10/15/2010 5:55:56 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 37 Swales’ (2006) solution to this problem is to have students create their own tailor-made corpora and this seems a good way forward. However, as noted above, it may well be difficult with larger groups and shorter courses. The approach taken here was to use pre-compiled corpora in two contrasting disciplines likely to be relevant to many of the students. Clearly, it would be desirable to expand the disciplines represented, particularly to include humanities theses. However, it is not claimed that these corpora match students’ fields exactly; rather it is argued that they provide an indication of some of the lexicogrammatical options available for expressing the rhetorical function studied. When working with such corpora, it is important to emphasise that the results should always be compared with what students observe in their own discipline. In fact, one advantage of using such corpora is precisely that it discourages students from viewing the corpus results as providing the single ‘right’ answer; instead they are predisposed to exercise caution and check findings against their own disciplinary knowledge. What students learn from their concordancing is the more general skill of noticing and interpreting linguistic features and this can be profitably applied in their own fields. 2.5.3. ‘Analysing the concordance lines took too much time because there was a lot of data’ The next issue concerns the amount of data consulted, which caused difficulty for some students: 34% of participants agreed with the statement above, while only 42% disagreed. This problem has also been noted before, though usually because of the number of individual concordance lines (Frankenberg-Garcia 2005b; Gavioli 2005). Here, the numbers of lines were limited (typically around 10–20), but a greater amount of context was examined. When studying rhetorical functions, it is important that students examine enough context to ensure that they can observe the patterns, without being overwhelmed by the quantity of data. However, concordances do have an important role to play in investigating context (Charles 2007). In particular I would argue that, far from being mere instances of ‘decontextualised’ language (Widdowson 2000), concordance lines enable students to understand the importance of context better than paper-based materials in certain respects. First, when working with relevant specialised corpora, EAP students will be familiar with the general social and communicative context of the source texts (Flowerdew 2008). More significantly, however, when a student reads a concordance line, it is clear that they are looking at a fragment of text, and this incompleteness AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 37 10/15/2010 5:55:56 PM 38 Maggie Charles acts as a stimulus to expand lines and/or access the original file, two ways of examining the wider linguistic context which are not available with paper-based extracts. Thus concordances are valuable not just for studying relatively short lexicogrammatical patterns, but also for working with extended contexts and investigating discourse level features such as rhetorical functions. 2.5.4. ‘It was easy to perform the searches using the WordSmith Concordance program’ Only 62% of respondents agreed that performing the searches was easy, while 18% somewhat disagreed, giving one of the lowest positive evaluations in the feedback. Class attendance did not seem to be a factor, as even the students with full attendance returned very similar percentages to those given above. I would suggest that there are two main reasons. First, the necessity of ensuring a limited number of concordance lines leads to more complicated searches, involving, for example, context items or wild cards. For a beginner in corpus work, this undoubtedly presents a challenge. Secondly, if the main focus of the class is on learning the rhetorical function, it is more difficult to present the corpus tasks in a systematic and graded sequence, with the result that students may be overloaded with new technical information at the beginning of the course, and there may be little sense of progression in concordancing skills. These disadvantages may thus derive from the decision to subordinate the learning of corpus techniques to the study of discourse functions. While some further adjustments in the difficulty and sequencing of the corpus tasks can certainly be made, it is probably unavoidable that some students will still experience difficulties. Given the four problematic issues discussed above, we must ask whether the benefits of the approach outweigh the costs. In addition to the considerable resource and training needs pointed out by others (e.g. Thompson 2006), I would highlight some practical issues of class management. On the negative side, corpus work takes a considerable amount of class time, not all of which may be profitably spent. Most obviously, there may be problems with the hardware or software that cause delays in performing searches, with the result that little actual analysis of the concordance lines takes place. For teachers without readily available technical support, time spent sorting out computing problems is time taken from the pedagogical focus of the class; it can sometimes seem as though one is teaching computing rather than academic writing. AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 38 10/15/2010 5:55:56 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 39 Second, performing searches and interpreting concordance lines are new techniques. Even using controlled searches and focusing questions, students find them difficult and require considerable practice. For example, they may need help to see how individual concordance lines fit the pattern studied or how they themselves can make use of the data. For the teacher of a large class, it is difficult to keep track of the progress of all the students and ensure useful outcomes for everyone. Irregular attendance also means that training on technical aspects may have to be repeated, which further reduces the time available for task-related guidance. Such practical class management problems undoubtedly reduce the appeal of using corpora for many teachers who work in mainstream EAP classes. Even under such circumstances, however, it is still possible to incorporate hands-on concordancing into courses and, as the feedback in this study shows, this can be a positive experience for many students. On the benefit side, as Johns pointed out from the inception of DDL (1991), corpus consultation tends to promote learning based on discovery and induction, which is highly motivating for many, though admittedly not all, students. Moreover, concordancing fosters an evidence-based rather than intuitionbased approach, which seems to be particularly attractive to research students. Working with concordance lines provides access to a wealth of examples and promotes detailed attention to language, encouraging students to notice the linguistic features that characterise the searched item, and leading to the discovery and understanding of distinctions in forms of expression. In revealing this patterning of language, then, corpus work facilitates the learning of both lexicogrammar and discourse features. 2.6. Conclusions I have argued that teaching large groups of mixed-discipline students poses specific problems when incorporating corpus work into academic writing classes. In the course reported here, the use of just two generically appropriate corpora, of controlled searches and of focusing questions posed by the teacher, sought to address students’ need to achieve specific goals with limited inputs of time and resources. I have also suggested that advanced students of academic writing need to learn not only local lexicogrammatical patterns, but also higher level discourse features. The materials described here attempted to achieve this by integrating concordancing very closely into work on rhetorical functions. As shown by their positive responses, students considered that they did learn discourse AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 39 10/15/2010 5:55:56 PM 40 Maggie Charles features through the concordance work, engaging with the corpora to bridge the gap between their rhetorical concerns and their lexicogrammatical knowledge. The use of corpus consultation in conjunction with discourse work thus seems to provide a systematic approach that is both feasible and pedagogically valid. 2.7. Three goals on a cline of corpus competence More generally, I would suggest that a three-stage set of goals could be proposed for mainstream EAP classes. The first (and in my view indispensable) stage is ‘corpus awareness’. At this stage, students would know what a corpus is, have an idea of the sort of information it can provide and know how to access one of the freely available corpora. They would have used a concordance, perhaps on paper, but may not have performed any searches themselves. Indeed, as argued by Boulton (in press, 2010), ‘taking the computer out of the equation’ may be a positive advantage here. The introductory ‘corpus awareness’ stage demands minimal investment of class time by teacher and student. Its limited aim recognises that students may lack the time or motivation to take corpus work further at that point, but provides an option which they can pursue independently in the future. In this regard it is worth noting that a survey of 38 UK higher education institutions by Jarvis (2004) reported that the percentage of institutions using concordancing on at least one EFL course was only 19%. While the situation may well have improved since then, it is still likely that many students pass through EAP courses without ever becoming aware of the existence of corpora as a learning resource. The second stage would be ‘corpus literacy’ and, given appropriate training and technical facilities, I think this is an achievable goal for many, and perhaps most mainstream EAP students. At this stage, students can perform simple searches, have a basic understanding of how to interpret concordance data, and are able to use a corpus to answer relatively straightforward queries of their own. This goal demands a considerable investment of class time and the benefits are correspondingly greater. The final stage of ‘corpus proficiency’ would probably be achieved by only a minority of highly motivated students. It would imply that students are able to build their own corpora, to formulate more advanced searches and to interpret complex results accurately. This stage demands a greater investment of students’ own time, as they grapple with learning new skills to an accomplished level. Of course, there is no rigid division between the stages, but AGarcia_02_Fpp.indd 40 10/15/2010 5:55:56 PM Using concordancing to teach rhetorical functions 41 distinguishing these three goals on a cline of competence may help to clarify some of the issues involved in deciding what level of commitment to corpus work is appropriate in a given EAP teaching situation. References Aston, G. (1997), ‘Enriching the learning environment: corpora in ELT’, in A. Wichman, S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery and G. 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