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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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%
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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