British Academics Research Articles

Dynamicity of interaction in academic discourse: Evidence from a corpus-based study

Metadiscourse features are the rhetorical devices that serve to maintain the writer-reader and speaker-audience interaction. The way metadiscourse features are utilized in spoken and written modes may differ given the nature of these two modes of communication. For this reason, the present study set to unpack the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as investigate the construction and maintenance of writer-reader and speaker-audience interaction in academic written and spoken English. To achieve this goal, two corpora of The British Academic Written English Corpus and British Academic Spoken English Corpus were utilized as the data gathering resources. To categorize the metadiscourse features, Hyland's taxonomy was selected. The quantitative analysis of the data showcased that the written corpus was more interactive oriented despite the fact that the spoken corpus showed a propensity towards the interactional category of metadiscourse features. On the other hand, the analysis of the concordance lines illustrated that academic conventions differed significantly in spoken and written academic English which resulted in a dynamic interaction between writer-reader as well as speaker-audience. The results of the study at hand may have implications in such lines of research as corpus linguistics, contrastive analysis and genre studies.

A Multidimensional Analysis of Academic Writing: A Comparative Study of Saudi and British University Students’ Writing

Academic writing is one of the most crucial skills for university students across the globe; however, the conventions of writing vary across different cultures. This research study used a multidimensional approach to analyze Saudi students' writings compared to British students. A specialized corpus of Saudi academic English writing (CSAEW) was developed to explore interdisciplinary lexico-grammatical patterns. The data was collected from the undergraduate students enrolled in the universities from three regions across the Kingdom. The CSAEW was compared with the British Academic Writing English corpus. Biber's multidimensional model was used to examine linguistic features along dimensions such as involvement, information, argumentation, narration, and abstraction. The study provides evidence about how Saudi students prefer particular lexical and grammatical patterns over others and how Saudi academic writing is distinguished compared to British academic English. The study results indicate that CSAEW is more explicit and non-narrative than BCAW. There are marked differences on dimensions 1, 4, and 5. The mean scores of CSAEW and BCAW fall on the opposite side of the continuum. The findings document the patterns of linguistic variation in Saudi students' academic writing compared to that of British students. Based on the pattern of variation, the study provides some recommendations for pedagogical practices to improve Saudi students’ writing skills.

L1 novice writing as a missing piece in the Learner Corpus Research puzzle

Abstract This paper investigates the possible benefits of integrating an L1 novice corpus into the study of learner writing, through a study on hedging adverbials and complement clauses. A more traditional tripartite comparison is first drawn between French EFL learner writing, L1 English novice writing, and English expert writing. Then, a comparison is made between L1 French novice writing and French EFL learner writing. The study uses data from the following corpora: the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA; Paquot et al., 2022) (French EFL learner writing), the British Academic Written English (BAWE; Heuboeck et al., 2008) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP; Ädel & Römer, 2012) (both L1 English novice writing), the Kulturell Identitet i Akademisk Prosa: nasjonal versus disiplinavhengig (KIAP‑EN; Fløttum et al., 2006) corpus (English expert writing), and the The French Academic wRiting (FAR) corpus (L1 French novice writing). The results speak to the importance of including a L1 novice component to the current methodologies employed in Learner Corpus Research (LCR), since such inclusion helps to provide a better and more nuanced interpretation of the findings obtained by means of a more traditional tripartite approach.

A frequency, coverage, and dispersion analysis of the academic collocation list in university student writing

Abstract This study investigates whether cross-disciplinary academic collocation lists are of equal importance to EAP (English for academic purposes) learners across different disciplines. We target Ackermann and Chen’s (Ackermann, Kirsten & Yu-Hua Chen. 2013. Developing the Academic Collocation List (ACL)–A corpus-driven and expert-judged approach. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12(4). 235–247) Academic Collocation List (ACL) and conduct a frequency, coverage, and dispersion analysis of its 2,464 pairs in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. Using BAWE data, we also examine whether university students increase use of academic collocations across years. Generally, our results indicate that cover-all academic collocation lists, like academic word lists, show uneven frequency distributions across disciplines; the ACL covers considerably more word combinations in soft than hard sciences. According to our dispersion analysis, furthermore, an important cause for such skewed distributions is that a substantial part of the ACL (i.e., almost 25 %) is in actuality discipline-specific rather than generic collocations. In terms of collocation development, we do observe steady increases across years. Interestingly, university students throughout levels not only use more academic collocations, but display a stronger tendency to raise the proportion of discipline-specific collocations in writing. This study is novel as it systematically examines distributions and developments of academic collocations, and is pedagogically valuable in that it collects 483 ACL entries which are suitable targets for EAP learning.

Lexical Demands of Academic Written English: From Students’ Assignments to Scholarly Publications

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which contained 2,761 student assignments, and the Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE) corpus which included 4,000 scholarly articles. Results from the analyses demonstrated significant differences in lexical difficulty between students’ assignments and scholarly publications. The proportion of academic vocabulary in written texts was also found to increase as the writers’ levels went up. Cross-discipline comparisons highlighted the difference in lexical difficulties between scientific disciplines.

Breaking into British Academic Life in Second World War Britain: The Story of Rose Rand

Next article No AccessBreaking into British Academic Life in Second World War Britain: The Story of Rose RandKatarina MihaljevicKatarina Mihaljevic Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HOPOS Just Accepted Sponsored by The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726075 HistoryAccepted January 08, 2023 © 2023 The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Words of Facts: How British and Italian Students Use in Fact in Academic Writing

Abstract This study examines the frequency, meanings, lexico-grammatical and discursive features of the pragmatic marker in fact in an L1 subcorpus of the British Academic Written English corpus and in a learner corpus of essays written by Italian university students. One of four meanings, ‘contrast’, ‘specification’, ‘factuality’ and ‘support’, was assigned to each instance of in fact in both corpora. Similarities and differences emerged in the use of this pragmatic marker. All four meanings are present in both corpora; however, the ‘contrast’ and ‘specification’ meanings occur more often in the L1 corpus, while the ‘factuality’ and ‘support’ meanings occur more often in the L2 corpus. These findings suggest that the Italian learners are not fully aware of the multiple meanings of in fact.

Britain’s Contributions to Human Rights Law

This article assesses the various contributions made by the United Kingdom to the development of international human rights law (IHRL) in the last century and it focuses specifically on Britain’s contribution to the law and institutions of human rights as opposed to their enjoyment in practice. The initial focus of the article is on the political branches of the British State – its government and Parliament – in building the normative and institutional foundations of IHRL and in helping and promoting the work of these institutions. The article then looks at the contributions of the British judiciary and legal practitioners, which have been especially notable since the entry into force of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). Finally, the article looks at the contributions of British academics, who have played an outsized role in the scholarly study of IHRL when compared to those from most other States.

Sufficient or adequate evidence? Using corpus data to distinguish between near-synonymous adjectives in academic prose

Using the British Academic Written English Corpus as data, this study attempts to reveal the semantic and usage differences between adequate and sufficient, two near-synonymous adjectives often used in academic texts. The distributional patterns examined include overall and discipline frequency, syntactic functions, typical noun collocates and modifying adverbs. The results show a preference for sufficient in academic prose, where it is distinguished from adequate by a more frequent predicative use; an inclination towards it-extraposed constructions, and the VPto and pp_for patterns; the tendency to express more absolute and more specialized meanings; and a close collocational relationship with nouns relating to information. Adequate, which is less frequent, tends to more often modify abstract nouns and co-occur with the definite uses of its modifiees, and its uses may involve comparison. Insights from the study can support scholars in their lexical choices in English academic writing.

'Ici et par toute la terre': Paris, British universities and the French study abroad in the inter-war

This article begins with the recommendations of the Leathes Report of 1916 in connection with the internationalisation of language study and the reasons why the ideal of transnational mobility was slow to take root in language departments in the UK. It examines how the provision of safe, secure and affordable accommodation for women students was an effective counter to alarmist stay-at-home tales. And it looks at how feminist educators campaigned to promote international learning and teaching opportunities for women scholars. It argues that the Leathes concept of an ‘immersion’ experience conflicted with the University of Paris's interpretation of the ‘internationalisation’ of study. The Cité universitaire (CU) project, launched in the 1920s, offered the possibility for the easy placement of a growing number of students from the British red-brick universities in particular. But the conviction of British academics that the proposed Collège Franco-Britannique should house both French and British students was at odds with the University of Paris's concept of a campus of representative national houses in which only students of that country were permitted to live. It concludes that the mobilisation of the profession into subject bodies was a key factor in the evolution of study abroad programs and more broadly in the consolidation of ‘modern studies’ in the new civic and red-brick universities across Britain.

"We don't normally require that in other contexts, do we": Interpersonal meanings of tag questions in British university seminars based on the BASE corpus.

This study investigates the interpersonal meanings expressed by English tag questions in the context of British university seminars from two dimensions: evidential modification of tags and conduciveness of responses. The data for the study derive from seminars in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus, which is herein both quantitative and qualitative analyzed. The findings reveal that: (1) three-quarters of tag questions in the data are utilized by teachers, and the unmarked form of tag questions in university seminars are generally positive-negative forms, with a few examples of other varieties; (2) regarding evidential modification of tags, depending on the degree of epistemic certainty of the speakers on the proposition of the anchor, the default function of teachers' tag questions in the data is to convey emphasis, followed by confirmatory function, with only a few cases of informational function; and (3) regarding conduciveness of responses, over 70% of tag questions are followed by no verbal response, while less than 30% are followed by explicit responses. Accordingly, these findings raise the question of whether tag questions can really provide sufficient scope for interactions in classroom. It is hoped that this nuanced, corpus-based analysis of tag question utilization within the context of British university seminars would empirically reveal the interpersonal relations between teachers and students and thereby shed light on more efficient seminar discussions.

Mapping out the disciplinary variation of syntactic complexity in student academic writing

This study investigated disciplinary variation with respect to syntactic complexity in students' written academic texts from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. We measured syntactic complexity using the Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity and then conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses to examine the disciplinary differences across four disciplinary groups and 31 disciplines. The analyses identified statistically significant variation in length, subordination, coordination, phrasal sophistication, and overall sentence complexity among the disciplinary groups as well as disciplines, which was discussed from a form-function mapping perspective. This study also revealed the systematic variation and form-function mappings of syntactic complexity in discipline-specific academic writing in both disciplinary groups and disciplines. Pedagogically, these findings can be incorporated into the curriculum design and class instruction to cultivate students’ discipline-specific academic literacy.

Writing Trajectories of Grammatical Complexity at the University: Comparing L1 and L2 English Writers in BAWE

AbstractGrammatical complexity has been established as a key indicator of language and writing development (Ortega 2003; Bulté and Housen, 2014; Crossley and McNamara 2014). The present study uses the Register-Functional approach to complexity (Biber et al. 2022) to compare the development of L1 English and L2 English writers across year of study and discipline in the British Academic Written English corpus. It also introduces a novel method of examining developmental trajectories that uses both inferential statistics and descriptive measures to account not only for relationships between the year of study and use of linguistic features, but also for the shape of the trajectories and frequencies of occurrence over time. Statistical analyses reveal significant relationships for most of the complexity features. Means and confidence intervals indicate overall similarities in trends from early undergraduate to graduate-level writing across L1/L2 English writers, but also key differences in the developmental trajectories, including greater use of phrasal complexity features and less use of clausal features by L2 English writers in early levels, as well as distinct use of complexity features across certain disciplines.

The Use and Development of Lexical Bundles in Arab EFL Writing: A Corpus-driven Study

Background. Lexical Bundles (LBs) have become the focus of many recent corpus linguistics studies. Research has found variable use of LBs in terms of quality and quantity pertaining to different linguistic groups or registers. Still, there is a paucity of research investigating Arab EFL writers’ use and development of such a feature.
 Purpose. This study investigates the 4-word LBs use and development by Arab EFL learners and expert writers in a corpus of 250000 words regarding their frequency, functions, and structure.
 Methods. Two corpora were compiled for Arab learners and scholars. The LB use of both groups was compared to investigate the development of LB use. Further, the Arab corpus was analysed against a native reference corpus extracted from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus to compare LB use across the two corpora.
 Results and Implications. The results imply that there is no noticeable effect of postgraduate education or professional practice on using LBs. The other results, however, are in-line with the previous literature in that native speakers’ use of LBs varies in quantity and quality from non-natives’. The findings reveal that stance LBs are more frequent in the native corpus and that they tend to use more VP-based clausal LBs than their non-native counterparts. These findings offer empirical evidence that EFL writing quality is lower despite the current academic writing instruction they receive. They, therefore, indicate the need to foster academic writing instruction programs to include training on using LBs in learners’ writing at both Bachelor and postgraduate levels. Also, the results are expected to raise teachers’ awareness of how EFL learners use LBs to develop their writing quality and thus to adapt their teaching strategies accordingly. Moreover, Arab scholars are called to reconsider their use of effective writing techniques including LBs for more effective writing.

Revisiting Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing via Exploratory Factor Analysis.

Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity has received substantial research attention in applied linguistics (Bulté and Housen, 2014). The representation of grammatical complexity has expanded in L2 writing with the application of diverse measures in empirical studies in the recent three decades (1991–2020). In response to this situation, we found it important to revisit grammatical complexity, and an exploratory factor analysis was applied to explore latent dimensions (i.e., factors) of grammatical complexity in L2 writing. We analyzed Lu’s (2011) 14 grammatical complexity measures in the L2 corpus of the British Academic Written English Corpus. We then proposed a four-factor model with “clausal subordination,” “phrasal construction”, “global length unit” and “others.” The four factors generally align with the types of grammatical complexity proposed in Lu (2011), but differences on six measures are also found. Noteworthy points were discussed to interpret the reasons behind the differences. Research implications are provided to show further research directions.

Unpacking the function(s) of discourse markers in academic spoken English: a corpus-based study

Discourse markers can have various functions depending on the context in which they are used. Taking this into consideration, in this corpus-based research, we analyzed and unveiled quantitatively and qualitatively the functions of four discourse markers in academic spoken English. To this purpose, four discourse markers, i.e., “I mean,” “I think,” “you see,” and “you know,” were selected for the study. The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus was used as the data gathering source. To detect the discourse markers, concordance lines of the corpus were carefully read and analyzed. The quantitative analysis demonstrated that from among the four discourse markers, “you know” and “you see” were the most and the least frequent ones in the corpus, respectively. In line with the quantitative analysis, the qualitative analysis of the concordance lines demonstrated that there were various functions with regard to each of the four discourse markers. The findings of this study can have implications in fields such as corpus-based studies, genre analysis, and contrastive linguistics.

A corpus-assisted analysis of grammatical metaphors in successful student writing

Research has established the critical role grammatical metaphor (GM) plays in academic discourse and argues for its explicit instruction. However, despite a growing body of research investigating students’ use of GM, there is as yet no reference tool to assist researchers or instructors examining or teaching this powerful resource. Although some automated analyses are enabled through corpus tools, these studies are limited to derivational GMs. To respond to these inefficiencies, the present study presents a profile of GMs used in a 164,925-word sample of the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE). Our aim in compiling this profile was to identify which GMs successful students most commonly use in the four disciplinary groupings provided in the BAWE. By doing so, we are able to provide an introductory list of 2702 experiential GMs instructors could use to inform their teaching of GM and researchers could use to inform further GM investigations in other corpora.

Toyin Falola@65 Conference: African Knowledge and Alternative Futures

A defining moment for me at the Toyin Falola@65 Conference titled “African Knowledges and Alternative Futures” that ran from the 29th to the 31st of January 2018 at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, was the declaration at a paper presentation session by a scholar from a Nigerian university that the culture of making promotion of Nigerian academics dependent on publication in journals outside Nigeria, particularly from the West, is ultimately counterproductive to the development of a robust academic culture in Nigeria. “Do US or British academics, for example, have to publish in Nigerian journals?” he asked. This loaded question is at the heart of the challenges and paradoxes provoked by the conference. Another definitive encounter for me was another presenter’s outlining of the concept of an African, as different from an Asian or a Western epistemology or way of arriving at relating to knowledge. Yet another was Emmanuel Ofuasia’s explanation of what he describes as the Yoruba origin Ifa knowledge system’s anticipating of deconstructivist hermeneutics centuries before the development of this post-modern scholarly phenomenon in the West. Complementing these occurrences is yet another represented by Dr. Joan Ugo Mbagwu expounding on indigenous methods of conflict resolution and countering terrorism in Africa. I shall use these encounters as pivots in exploring the significance of the conference in the body of this essay.

Functional Patterns of Lexical Bundles and Limitations in Academic Writing by Thai L2 English Learners

<p><em>Lexical bundles, which serve as markers of fluent and appropriate language use, are referred to as "building blocks of discourse" because they occur frequently in written texts and help readers and writers process information more quickly. They also provide important linguistic functions. However, lexical bundles can vary across genres, domains and even sections of the same work, which can be challenging for novice and non-native writers. The purposes of this study are to explore how Thai L2 undergraduate students use lexical bundles in their academic papers written in English and to compare the use of lexical bundles with that in two written corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and Cambridge Academic English (CAE). A total of 53 research reports, or approximately 615,750 words, from Thai L2 students of English language studies and applied linguistics were systematically compiled and analysed. The most frequent four-word n-grams in the corpora were then identified and their types and functions categorised. Keyword analysis was used to compare the key n-grams identified in each academic corpus. The results show that native and non-native writers use lexical bundles in rather different ways. Some patterns that did not occur in the reference corpus were overused by Thai L2 English students. The data suggest that the inclusion of phraseology in L2 writing instruction has pedagogical implications. This study can be of great pedagogical value, especially for EAP instructors, as it reveals frequent patterns in the form of a pedagogically useful list of word combinations. By extension, the data presented can be used by non-native writers or academics, especially novice Thai writers, to improve their use of phraseological patterns in writing academic research reports or writing for publication.</em></p>

Intensifier-Verb Collocations in Academic English by Chinese Learners Compared to Native-Speaker Students

Abstract It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.