COVENTRY PIM 2014. PODCASTS

Bella Reichard, INTO Newcastle University

Concordance tools for international business students – why and how

As a non-native academic writer, I often find that dictionaries do not provide enough information on how a word is used in context and whether it is appropriate for my purposes. However, concordancers often do provide answers in these cases, so international students should be encouraged to use these tools. To this end, I designed a set of materials (PowerPoint and workbook) which was used with students on an undergraduate business pathway programme. In this session, I will give an overview of this project by: introducing the materials; offering student comments on the use of concordancers; evaluating the project and results; making further suggestions for implementation of the materials and for training students to use corpus tools.

Bella Reichard teaches EAP at INTO Newcastle University on the International Diploma in Business pathway programme. She has recently completed an MA in Applied Language Studies at Durham University.

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Katrien Deroey, University of Luxembourg

Corpus-based materials design for EAP listening: the road less travelled

 To assess how representative discourse organisational cues in EAP listening books are, I compared importance marking cues with those I retrieved from the BASE lectures using corpus-based and corpus-driven methods. The corpus investigation revealed a large variety of importance markers, the most common of which (e.g. the point is; remember; anyway; not talk about) differ from those which usually appear in EAP materials. More specifically, the predominant markers in the corpus were multifunctional and less explicit than their far less frequently used prototypical counterparts (e.g. the important point is; you should note; that’s an aside; that’s irrelevant) (cf. Deroey 2013; Deroey & Taverniers 2012a; Deroey & Taverniers 2012b). However, the EAP books I examined vary widely in their inclusion of importance markers and mostly provide fairly prototypical, explicit examples. Most are also not (obviously) based on corpus research. In short, much remains to be done to ensure that corpus evidence informs lecture listening materials so that students are better prepared for the demands of their course lectures.

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Philip Durrant, University of Exeter

Mapping Variation in the Phraseology of Student Writing

 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.

Phil Durrant has been a teacher of EFL and EAP in Turkey (mostly at Bilkent University) and the UK (at Durham University). Since completing his PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, he has taught on masters and doctoral programmes at Bilkent University and the University of Exeter, where he is currently director of the EdD TESOL programme. Phil's current research focuses on the use and learning of vocabulary and formulaic language in academic contexts.

Durrant, P. (2014). Discipline and Level Specificity in University Students' Written Vocabulary. Applied Linguistics, 3(35), 328-356. Abstract.

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David C King & Helen Hickey, University of the Arts, London

The Need for an Art & Design Learner Corpus: Closing the Gap

 The use of corpora within EAP (both EGAP and ESAP) continues to grow (Hyland 2000, 2002; McEnery & Xiao 2010) and has been used to provide insights into written and spoken academic English, which in turn have often informed materials development (e.g., Cambridge Academic English Corpus, COBUILD). However, much of the work conducted in corpora-informed materials design has tended to be of a general nature (e.g., JDEST, Yang 1986) or of a specific nature (e.g., Medical Science, Marco 1999;Pharmaceutical Science, Gledhill 2000) that does not address the needs of Art & Design students and teachers.
We argue that the language of Art & Design writing (e.g., its lexico-grammatical features, the explicit link the writing must make to creative practice) warrants the compilation of a specialist learner corpus. As a result, we have begun creating such a corpus that attempts to redress this lacuna. More specifically, our project is the compilation of a learner corpus of written academic English as produced by international students (whose first language is not English) on a university presessional course. We propose to expand the content of our corpus to include writing at different stages of a student’s academic career, as well as writing from a wide range of Art & Design disciplines. This will enable an analysis of the writing produced for various disciplines within Art & Design. In turn, we argue that this data should be used to inform materials design for presessional and insessional courses. The presentation will discuss the context, construction, and preliminary findings of our work on our Art & Design corpus to date. In conclusion our project reaffirms the need for and usefulness of specialist corpora within EAP.

David C King and Helen Hickey constructed corpora for their MAs and work as EAP tutors at the University of the Arts London. Their interests reside in applying corpus derived data to an Art & Design HE environment.

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Holly Vass, Coventry University

Perfect Worlds and Reasonable Men: Helping EALP (English for Academic Legal Purposes) Students Understand Hedging in Legal Discourse

This session presents recent corpus research on hedging in specialized corpora of Supreme Court decisions and law journal articles using WordSmith Tools. The two legal genres were chosen because they could potentially be handled by post-graduate LLM (Master of Laws) students and are therefore relevant to EALP (English for Academic Legal Purposes) students. These two genres are important as they can inform law students’ thinking and underpin their ability to engage in legal analysis and argumentation. In addition, in legal education “it is not simply a question of handling one genre but several at the same time… whether one considers legal cases, legislative provisions or textbooks.
None of these genres can be handled adequately in isolation” (Bhatia, 1993: 179). A
variety of lexico-grammatical items serving as hedges, as well as hedging strategies and functions were identified in both genres with a view to describing how and why hedging is used by certain expert practitioners to further both institutional and private goals. Due to the important interactional and social functions hedges perform, as well as the role they play in conveying nuances in meaning having to do with certainty and commitment, learning to correctly produce and process a hedge is important for advanced English language learners (Repen et al., 2002). Thus, information garnered from this research could be useful in creating targeted activities to increase learners’ hedging repertoire as well as their production and interpretation of hedging. For non-native students whose first language is not English, and who may be trained in a completely different legal and law education system affording them little or no previous knowledge of the US or UK legal genres, this can prove especially challenging.

Holly Vass currently lectures in English and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), but taught legal English for 10 years to international students both in Spain and in the UK.

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Alex Bennett & John Williams, University of Portsmouth

Portsmouth Corpus Builder: a tool for quick and easy corpus creation

The usefulness of learner corpora for identifying the characteristics (and characteristic errors) of student writing is now widely recognized. Elsewhere, students are being encouraged to construct their own discipline-specific corpora in order to investigate the target language they are aiming towards in their own writing (Charles, 2012). However, in the latter case especially, for the non-expert, building a corpus substantial enough to be useful can be a long laborious process, involving manual file-by-file conversion to plain text of documents in pdf, Microsoft Word, or other formats. The free Portsmouth Corpus Builder program is designed to take much of the pain out of that process. Previously available only as a Unix command?line program, this pre-release Windows PC version boasts a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, improved conversion times, and the capacity to convert a range of formats (pdf, doc, docx, rtf, zip...) in whole batches and entire folders. The program will be demonstrated using both a set of student projects downloaded from TurnItIn, and a mixed set of academic articles. It should be possible to create a 1.5 million word learner corpus in seconds, ready to be analysed in AntConc.

Alex Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in Computing with a strong interest in language. She has designed her own concordancing tools.
John Williams is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, with research
interests in lexicography and corpus linguistics.

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