Advances in Corpus-Based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of Discipline, Register, and Writer Expertise PDF
Preview Advances in Corpus-Based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of Discipline, Register, and Writer Expertise
Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise edited by Ute Römer Viviana Cortes Eric Friginal S t u d i e s i n C o r p u s L i n g u i s t i c s 95 JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL) issn 1388-0373 SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/scl General Editor Founding Editor Ute Römer Elena Tognini-Bonelli Georgia State University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena Advisory Board Laurence Anthony Susan Hunston Waseda University University of Birmingham Antti Arppe Michaela Mahlberg University of Alberta University of Birmingham Michael Barlow Anna Mauranen University of Auckland University of Helsinki Monika Bednarek Andrea Sand University of Sydney University of Trier Tony Berber Sardinha Benedikt Szmrecsanyi Catholic University of São Paulo Catholic University of Leuven Douglas Biber Elena Tognini-Bonelli Northern Arizona University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena Marina Bondi Yukio Tono University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Jonathan Culpeper Martin Warren Lancaster University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Sylviane Granger Stefanie Wulff University of Louvain University of Florida Stefan Th. Gries University of California, Santa Barbara Volume 95 Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise Edited by Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise Edited by Ute Römer Viviana Cortes Eric Friginal Georgia State University John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Cover design: Françoise Berserik Cover illustration from original painting Random Order by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996. doi 10.1075/scl.95 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2019055545 (print) / 2019055546 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0506 3 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6145 8 (e-book) © 2020 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com Table of contents Introduction: Advances in corpus-based research on academic writing 1 Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal Part I. Focus on writer expertise and nativeness status A corpus-based study of academic word use in EFL student writing 9 Eniko Csomay Give constructions in Korean EFL learner writing 33 Yunjung Nam A corpus-based exploration of constructions in written academic English as a lingua franca 59 Selahattin Yilmaz and Ute Römer The influence of sources on First-Year Composition L1 student writing: A multi-dimensional analysis 89 Stephen M. Doolan Students’ use of lexical bundles: Exploring the discipline and writing experience interface 115 Ndeye Bineta Mbodj and Scott A. Crossley Part II. Focus on disciplinary variation Combining rhetorical move analysis with multi-dimensional analysis: Research writing across disciplines 137 Bethany Gray, Elena Cotos and Jordan Smith Lexical bundles across disciplines: A look at consistency and variability 169 Randi Reppen and Shannon B. Olson Lexical bundles as reflections of disciplinary norms in Spanish and English literary criticism, history, and psychology research 183 William Michael Lake and Viviana Cortes vi Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing Adjectives as nominal pre-modifiers in chemistry and applied linguistics research articles 205 Deise P. Dutra, Jessica M. S. Queiroz, Luciana D. de Macedo, Danilo D. Costa and Elisa Mattos The use of lexical patterns in engineering: A corpus-based investigation of five sub-disciplines 227 Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker and Anthony Becker Stance in unpublished student writing: An exploratory study of modal verbs in MICUSP’s Physical Science papers 255 Kimberly Becker and Hui-Hsien Feng Part III. Focus on register variation P-frames and rhetorical moves in applied linguistics conference abstracts 281 Jungwan Yoon and J. Elliott Casal Stand-alone literature reviews: A new multi-dimensional analysis 307 Heidi R. Wright A multi-dimensional view of collocations in academic writing 333 Maria Carolina Zuppardi and Tony Berber Sardinha Name index 355 Subject index 357 Introduction Advances in corpus-based research on academic writing Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal Georgia State University As its title indicates, the present volume showcases recent advances in corpus-based research on academic writing. This topic emerged as a central theme at the 14th conference of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL), held at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA in September 2018. The editors of the vol- ume (who also served as organizers of AACL 2018) invited authors who had pre- sented work on this topic at the conference to submit proposals for inclusion in the present volume. Written by a mix of established and up-and-coming researchers, the selected contributions show applications of innovative corpus-based methodol- ogies, replicate earlier studies to validate methodological procedures, investigate ac- ademic registers rarely analyzed using corpus-based methods before, and compare the linguistic production of different groups of academic writers against each other. What we consider particularly novel aspects of the collection are the inclusion of research that combines rhetorical moves with multi-dimensional analysis, work that incorporates textual position analyses of frequent items across disciplines and languages, studies that cover both fixed and variable phraseological items (lexical bundles, phrase-frames, constructions), and research that is based on corpora of English as an academic lingua franca. Gray (2015) states that the written language of academia has distinct charac- teristics that make it different from other types of language, and a vast number of studies from varied areas in the field of applied linguistics that used very different research methodologies have proven this statement right (see for example, Biber 1988; Crompton 1997; Flowerdew 2002; Grabe & Kaplan 1997; Halliday & Martin 1993; Hyland 2000, among many others). Over the past two decades, corpus-based methodologies have been favored in the analysis of a wide variety of written regis- ters frequently produced in academia because these methodologies provide reliable and generalizable findings that yield applications that help complete the description of these registers and, in many cases, can have direct pedagogical applications. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.int © 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company 2 Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal Recent studies like the ones reported in Biber & Gray (2016), Cao & Hu (2014), Gray (2015), Kopaczyk & Tyrkkö (2018), and Parkinson (2013), to mention only a few examples, used corpus-based research methodologies to identify and analyze linguistic phenomena in written academic registers. These studies range from fo- cusing on metadiscourse markers and disciplinary and research paradigm linguistic variation to analyses of grammatical features of complexity and elaboration. The large numbers of corpus-based studies that have been published in books, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed journals have helped provide a thorough description of the lexico-grammatical features of academic registers (see for example, Gray 2015: 15–18, for a summary of studies of language use in academic research arti- cles). There is, however, still a lot of unexplored territory in this area – a gap that the contributions to this volume attempt to address. The studies included in this volume are based on a wide range of corpora spanning first (L1) and second language (L2) academic writing at different levels of writing expertise, containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines), and of different academic registers. These three areas of focus (writer expertise and L1 status, disciplinary variation, register variation) provide the organization of the volume and the division of its 14 chapters into three parts. Part I of the volume focuses on which effects writer expertise and nativeness status of the writer can have on academic writing. It starts with two chapters that focus on second language (L2) learner writing in academic settings, the first one entitled “A corpus-based study of academic word use in EFL student writing” and written by Eniko Csomay. Based on a corpus of writing assignments collected in a dual-degree program in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathe- matics) in Tbilisi, Georgia, Csomay traces progress in students’ writing by quan- tifying their use of academic vocabulary. The second chapter by Yunjung Nam on “Give constructions in Korean EFL learner writing” draws on data from the Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC; Rhee & Jung 2014) and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP; Römer & O’Donnell 2011) as it discusses dominant patterns in the use of constructions of the high-frequency verb give by L1 Korean novice academic writers compared to L1 English novice writers. Nam’s study highlights aspects of English lexicogrammar that L1 Korean novice academic writers struggle with and has important implications for academic writing pedagogy in a Korean EFL setting. Also focusing on lexicogrammatical patterns is Selahattin Yilmaz and Ute Römer’s chapter on “A corpus-based exploration of constructions in written academic English as a lingua franca.” Using a corpus of English as a lingua franca (ELF) writing produced in academic settings and a subset of academic writ- ing from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008–) as a reference dataset, the authors demonstrate how a combined key function word and phraseological analysis can lead to the identification of constructions that are Introduction 3 characteristic of written academic ELF. Next in Part I of the volume is a chapter by Stephen Doolan on “The influence of sources on first-year composition L1 student writing: A multidimensional analysis”. With the help of a multi-dimensional anal- ysis and a corpus of student essays, Doolan highlights core aspects of source-based language use by English as a first language novice academic writers. His study allows us to better understand the complex task of referencing and has practical implica- tions for first-year composition teachers and students. The final chapter of Part I of the volume entitled “Students’ use of lexical bundles: Exploring the discipline and writing experience interface” is written by Ndeye Bineta Mbodj and Scott Crossley. The authors use a variety of corpora of novice and expert writing in medical and non-medical fields to investigate in what ways and to what extent academic writing expertise and field-specific knowledge contribute to the production of medical lex- ical bundles. With its concentration on medical English, the Mbodj and Crossley chapter serves as a bridge between the first part and the second part of the collection which focuses on disciplinary variation. The chapters in Part II of the volume highlight how academic writing may differ based on the discipline or sub-discipline texts come from. First up, Bethany Gray, Elena Cotos and Jordan Smith’s contribution entitled “Combining rhetor- ical move analysis with multi-dimensional analysis: Research writing across dis- ciplines” is methodologically particularly interesting. It shows how two analytic techniques that are commonly used in academic writing research can be integrated to provide valuable new insights into the mapping of communicative functions and linguistic patterns in research articles from a wide range of disciplines. Informed by the results of their study, the authors also argue for further required adapta- tions of multi-dimensional analysis for use with move-annotated data. Next, Randi Reppen and Shannon Olson in their chapter entitled “Lexical bundles across dis- ciplines: A look at consistency and variability”, discuss both discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary fixed bundles, as well as bundles with variable slots (also known as phrase-frames), in a large corpus of course readings from nine disci- plines (Architecture, Business, Culinary Science, Digital Arts, Fashion Design, Film, Hospitality Industry, Interior Design, and Studio Arts). The authors high- light the value of especially those bundles they identified as “cross-disciplinary” in pedagogical contexts and share practical activities that may promote awareness of lexical bundles for students and teachers. Also focusing on lexical bundles and sharing insights of pedagogical relevance, the chapter by William Lake and Viviana Cortes on “Lexical bundles as reflections of disciplinary norms in Spanish and English literary criticism, history, and psychology research” illuminates aspects of humanities and social sciences writing in two world languages. Access to parallel corpora of research articles in English and Spanish allowed the authors to not only analyze disciplinary but also cross-linguistic variation in lexical bundles which
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