Abstract
Contraction forms in English are mostly occur in speech and informal writing and they are generally avoided in formal writing types such as academic prose, business reports and journal articles, therefore, most teachers discourage their use in academic essays (Biber, Johansonn, Leech, Conrad and Finegan 1999). Contractions in English have two types; negative contractions (isn’t, haven’t, doesn’t) and verb contractions (I’m, they’ve, that’s). This corpus based study attempts to investigate contraction usage in learner and native English speaker essays. Major goal is to examine whether learners consider essay writing rules in respect of contractions which are accepted inappropriate for academic prose style. Five corpora, three learner and two native English, were utilized in order to analyze verb and not-contraction forms. Frequency calculations of contraction forms in each corpus compared via log-likelihood measurement for statistical significance. Results revealed that learners use considerably more contraction forms, especially negative ones, than native English students in their argumentative essays.Keywords: English for Academic Purposes, learner corpus, contractions
Highlights
Academic writing refers to writing in a particular style with a certain set of rules and patterns for a particular purpose
Contraction forms in English are mostly occur in speech and informal writing and they are generally avoided in formal writing types such as academic prose, business reports and journal articles, most teachers discourage their use in academic essays (Biber, Johansonn, Leech, Conrad and Finegan 1999)
While contractions can be very useful in written English, experts caution against the use of contractions in formal communication since they tend to add a light and informal tone to writing and they are often inappropriate for academic research papers, technical writing, business presentations, and other types of official correspondence
Summary
Academic writing refers to writing in a particular style with a certain set of rules and patterns for a particular purpose. Main aim is to express a central point related to an argument structure with a formal, standard written language to inform a certain audience group including a community of researchers, lecturers, students, etc. While contractions can be very useful in written English, experts caution against the use of contractions in formal communication since they tend to add a light and informal tone to writing and they are often inappropriate for academic research papers, technical writing, business presentations, and other types of official correspondence. Some types of text such as fictional stories or novels, dialogue, or personal letters or emails, can benefit from the inclusion of contractions in order to create a more informal and/or conversational tone. Some people have an idea that contractions represent an efficient way of communicating in the era of text-messages via communication devices or social media and they save authors from using every single letter of every single word (Tepper, 2014)
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