British Academic Written English Corpus 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A comparison of degree intensifiers across English corpora: Is it ‘flagrant’, ‘blatant’, or ‘sheer’ audacity?

Due to its free-adjoining nature, the category of adjuncts is generally viewed as somewhat peripheral to the forefront of grammatical relations. Meanwhile, given the significance of the media in the present world and the ever-growing prevalence of the notion of news values, outlining the criteria conducive to a message becoming news and including values such as negativity, superlativeness, prominence, timeliness, proximity, etc. (Bednarek, Caple 2014), the broad range of linguistic means encoding intensification, thereby foregrounding a given phenomenon, presents a considerable interest. In this corpus study, we focus on three adjectival emphasisers, flagrant, blatant, and sheer, and examine their use in adjective + noun collocations across a variety of English corpora on the Sketch Engine tool (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) in the academic and the news registers: the “British Academic Written English Corpus”, the “Cambridge Academic English Corpus”, the “English Language Newspapers Corpus”, the “Brexit WR Corpus”, and the “English Timestamped JSI Corpus 2020–10”. We also consider the nominal element the adjectives in question collocate with, seeking to provide an account as to their differences in English. The findings of the study may have implications both for language classrooms and for more specialized fields, such as media studies.

A comparative study of keyword extraction algorithms for English texts

Abstract This study mainly analyzed the keyword extraction of English text. First, two commonly used algorithms, the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) algorithm and the keyphrase extraction algorithm (KEA), were introduced. Then, an improved TF–IDF algorithm was designed, which improved the calculation of word frequency, and it was combined with the position weight to improve the performance of keyword extraction. Finally, 100 English literature was selected from the British Academic Written English Corpus for the analysis experiment. The results showed that the improved TF–IDF algorithm had the shortest running time and took only 4.93 s in processing 100 texts; the precision of the algorithms decreased with the increase of the number of extracted keywords. The comparison between the two algorithms demonstrated that the improved TF–IDF algorithm had the best performance, with a precision rate of 71.2%, a recall rate of 52.98%, and an F 1 score of 60.75%, when five keywords were extracted from each article. The experimental results show that the improved TF–IDF algorithm is effective in extracting English text keywords, which can be further promoted and applied in practice.

Metadiscourse in Academic Written and Spoken English: A Comparative Corpus-Based Inquiry

This paper reports on a comparative study performed in the field of Corpus Linguistics. The objective of the research was to analyze the distributional pattern of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features in two modes of academic spoken and written English. For this reason, a list of metadiscourse characteristics was gathered. By using the Sketch engine software, all the words were scrutinized in the corpus and their concordance lines were analyzed one by one in both corpora (British Academic Written English Corpus and British Academic Spoken English Corpus). As the data can show, in both corpora, the general propensity of the authors was towards the interactive metadiscourse features. In addition, in the written corpus, the transitions and endophoric markers were used more often; while in the spoken, endophoric markers and transitions were the most frequently applied metadiscourse features. In the interactional metadiscourse features, hedges and self-mentions were the most frequent in the written form; whereas in the spoken, self-mentions and boosters were used moe often.

Underproduction or Overproduction? A Corpus-based Study of Chinese EFL Learners’ Use of English Relative Clauses

This paper attempts to examine whether Chinese English learners adopt the underproduction or overproduction behavior when using English relative clauses in academic writing. To achieve the objective of the study, the researchers used a corpus-based method to analyze and compare the production of the restrictive relative clause among Chinese students and native English students. The aims were to find out if the Chinese students underproduce the English relative clause and also examine how frequently they use that, which, and zero relative pronouns as reported in the sub-corpus of the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learner (WECCL) and the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE). Based on the findings, conclusions are drawn as follows; compared to native English students, Chinese EFL learners generally tend to underproduce the restrictive relative clause in academic writing; and on the other hand, overuse the relative pronoun that. The observations from this study concur with the findings from previous studies

The expression of obligation in student academic writing

The importance for writers of negotiating reader relationships is by now well-established; this is a particularly delicate area for students who are of course writing for a higher status audience. One aspect of this is the expression of obligation, which up to now has not received a great deal of attention. This study seeks to address this issue by investigating some key expressions of obligation occurring in proficient student university assignments in the British Academic Written English corpus. A functional framework adapted from Hyland (2002) is used to investigate how the obligation expressions vary in use according to function. This corpus-based investigation reveals an association between lower ‘responsibility’ impersonal expressions and ‘riskier’ obligation contexts. Further qualitative analysis then explores the functions in greater detail to focus on the constraints that proficient student writers see as applying to these expressions of obligation. Pedagogical implications are then considered.

Metadiscourse in Academic English Texts: A Corpus-driven probe into British Academic Written English Corpus

This paper reports on a research performed in the field of corpus linguistics on metadiscourse features in the British Academic Written English Corpus. For this purpose, the British Academic Written English Corpus, which is freely available and contains 6,968,089 words, was selected as the data resource of the study. The taxonomy of metadiscourse features compiled by Hyland was used as the theoretical framework and the R program was used as the statistical software. The whole corpus was analyzed. As the data can show, the interactive metadiscourse features were more prevalent than the interactional metadiscourse features. In the interactive category, transitions and endophoric markers were used more than other ones; whereas, in the interactional category, hedges and boosters were the predominant metadiscourse features. The prevalence nature of interactive metadiscourse features can add support to the idea that writers were more interested in organizing discourse rather than conducting interaction. The findings of this research can have useful implications for researchers in such fields as contrastive analysis, text linguistics and corpus-based studies.

On the phraseology of the linking adverbial besides

This paper examines the phraseology of the linking adverbial besides to unravel why, unlike similar-meaning transitions such as in addition, it sounds unnatural in some contexts (e.g., His efforts finally paid off. He successfully defended his dissertation; besides, he got a job offer). A total of 217 instances from four academic (sections of) written English corpora—the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, the British Academic Written English corpus, the British National Corpus, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English—and 45 English dictionaries and grammar reference materials were analyzed to identify its pragmalinguistic features within discourse. The results suggest that while most reference materials define the usage of besides in relation to the nature of the element that follows, no consistent pattern can be discerned across those elements except that the clause introduced by besides functions exclusively as a supporting argument. In contrast, its natural use is found to be regulated by the nature of the preceding statement to which the besides-clause lends support: “Negativity” is encoded syntactically, semantically, or inferentially, entailing argumentative moves within a discourse unit. Pedagogical implications are discussed in light of the findings.

The BAWE Quicklinks Project: A New DDL Resource for University Students

This paper outlines a new initiative aimed at integrating concordances and other corpus outputs into written feedback for learners of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Although data-driven learning has by now a 30-year history, it has yet to have a great impact on mainstream pedagogy despite various claims regarding its efficacy and its benefits in terms of promoting learner autonomy. This situation may be due to technical barriers to the use of corpora in teaching, in particular the apparent complexity of most corpus interfaces to the uninitiated. We seek to circumvent these barriers by creating concordances to help students address their written errors. These concordances, found in the free-to-use British Academic Written English corpus, are made available as hyperlinks pasted into student work to help them address their errors by giving them direct access to instances of proficient academic writing. This paper will outline the methods used to create the concordances, the types of writing issues that are most amenable to this treatment and some initial student feedback on the first phase of an ongoing project to identify and categorise typical phraseological problems in student writing.

Recounting and reflecting: The use of first person pronouns in Chinese, Greek and British students' assignments in engineering

Chinese and Greek students are among the many international groups now studying at UK universities. While the written English of these groups has been extensively explored through the short argumentative essays comprising learner corpora, little research has been conducted on their assessed writing at undergraduate and Masters level. This paper reports on a study of Chinese, Greek and British student writing within the discipline of Engineering in five UK universities. Data is extracted primarily from the 6.5 million-word British Academic Written English corpus, supplemented by assignments from additional UK universities. The main aim of the study is to explore texts from students with different L1s and cultural backgrounds but within the same discipline and current educational system. First person pronouns were selected as a contained aspect of student writing for comparison, since these are a highly visible feature of a writer's identity construction (e.g. Hyland, 2002b), yet it is often claimed that L2 English students ‘over use’ these pronouns to the detriment of their writing (Lee & Chen, 2009). Findings indicate that the Chinese and Greek students make greater use of we in their writing within Engineering than British students and the paper explores the various functions of both we and I.

Applying Natural Language Processing Tools to a Student Academic Writing Corpus: How Large are Disciplinary Differences Across Science and Engineering Fields?

• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professional disciplinary writing (e.g., Ewer & Latorre, 1969; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Tse, 2007) for decades. Recently, research has taken important steps towards understanding disciplinary variation in student writing. Much of this research is corpus-based and focuses on lexico-grammatical features in student writing as captured in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The present study extends this work by analyzing lexical and cohesion differences among disciplines in MICUSP. Critically, we analyze not only linguistic differences in macro-disciplines (science and engineering), but also in micro-disciplines within these macro-disciplines (biology, physics, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering). • Literature Review: Hardy and Romer (2013) used a multidimensional analysis to investigate linguistic differences across four macro-disciplines represented in MICUSP. Durrant (2014, in press) analyzed vocabulary in texts produced by student writers in the BAWE corpus by discipline and level (year) and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles. Ward (2007) examined lexical differences within micro-disciplines of a single discipline. • Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows: 1. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between science and engineering student writing? 2. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between micro-disciplines within science and engineering student writing? • Research Methodology: To address the research questions, student-produced science and engineering texts from MICUSP were analyzed with regard to lexical sophistication and textual features of cohesion. Specifically, 22 indices of lexical sophistication calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES; Kyle & Crossley, 2015) and 38 cohesion indices calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO; Crossley, Kyle, & McNamara, 2016) were used. These features were then compared both across science and engineering texts (addressing Research Question 1) and across micro-disciplines within science and engineering (biology and physics, industrial and mechanical engineering) using discriminate function analyses (DFA). • Results: The DFAs revealed significant linguistic differences, not only between student writing in the two macro-disciplines but also between the micro-disciplines. Differences in classification accuracy based on students’ years of study hovered at about 10%. An analysis of accuracies of classification by paper type found they were similar for larger and smaller sample sizes, providing some indication that paper type was not a confounding variable in classification accuracy. • Discussion: The findings provide strong support that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences exist in student writing in these MICUSP samples and that these differences are likely not related to student level or paper type. These findings have important implications for understanding disciplinary differences. First, they confirm previous research that found the vocabulary used by different macro-disciplines to be “strikingly diverse” (Durrant, 2015), but they also show a remarkable diversity of cohesion features. The findings suggest that the common understanding of the STEM disciplines as “close” bears reconsideration in linguistic terms. Second, the lexical and cohesion differences between micro-disciplines are large enough and consistent enough to suggest that each micro-discipline can be thought of as containing a unique linguistic profile of features. Third, the differences discerned in the NLP analysis are evident at least as early as the final year of undergraduate study, suggesting that students at this level already have a solid understanding of the conventions of the disciplines of which they are aspiring to be members. Moreover, the differences are relatively homogeneous across levels, which confirms findings by Durrant (2015) but, importantly, extends these findings to include cohesion markers. • Conclusions: The findings from this study provide evidence that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences at the linguistic level exist in student writing, not only in lexical use but also in text cohesion. A number of pedagogical applications of writing analytics are proposed based on the reported findings from TAALES and TAACO. Further studies using different corpora (e.g., BAWE) or purpose assembled corpora are suggested to address limitations in the size and range of text types found within MICUSP. This study also points the way toward studies of disciplinary differences using NLP approaches that capture data which goes beyond the lexical and cohesive features of text, including the use of part-of-speech tags, syntactic parsing, indices related to syntactic complexity and similarity, rhetorical features, or more advanced cohesion metrics (latent semantic analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, Word2Vec approaches).

A genre-instantiation approach to teaching English for Specific Academic Purposes

This paper introduces five linked resources and demonstrates, with a focus on Business, Economics and Engineering, their use in a novel genre-instantiation approach to teaching academic writing. The resources centre on the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. They are: (1) published research literature that investigates the student assignment genres and registers; (2) descriptions of the contents of the corpus; (3) the BAWE corpus itself, which can be freely searched by teachers and learners; (4) online teaching materials based on the above; and (5) lesson plans from EAP teachers who use these materials in their teaching of presessional and in-sessional academic English. The genre instantiation approach to teaching academic writing builds on two central principles: the identification of key genres for target discipline-levels, and the exemplification of these through instances of successful student writing. This enables teachers to develop programmes that raise genre awareness, where learners can engage with instances from across specific topics, courses, levels and disciplines. The genre-instantiation approach is illustrated here with specific reference to Business Case Studies, Economics Essays and Engineering Methodology Recounts.

Transcending Concordance

This paper describes an automated scheme that extracts salient linguistic features from academic text and presents them in an interface designed for L2 students who are learning academic writing. The system is guided by several common ways of utilizing corpus technology in L2 writing. The authors have developed and tested an extraction method that identifies typical lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase in a corpus. Collocations and lexical bundles are automatically extracted; students can explore them by searching and browsing, and inspect them along with contextual information. They also present learners with common words, and academic words, hyperlinked to their usage and collocates in authentic contexts. This article uses a single running example, the British Academic Written English corpus, but the approach is fully automated and can be applied to any collection of English writing.

Academic Writing Development at the University Level

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing development from first-year undergraduate to graduate students, we also consider interactions with discipline and genre. The study goes beyond most previous work on grammatical complexity in writing by investigating the use of phrasal as well as clausal features. The results show that as academic level increases, the use of phrasal complexity features in writing also increases. On the other hand, the use of clausal complexity features in student writing, particularly finite dependent clauses, decreases as academic level increases. Results further indicate that the extent of the differences across level is mediated by discipline and genre, reflecting patterns observed in research on disciplinary variation in professional academic writing.

Automatic analysis of thematic structure in written English

This paper proposes and describes a computational system for the automatic analysis of thematic structure, as defined in Systemic Functional Linguistics, in written English. The system takes an English text as input and produces as output an analysis of the thematic structure of each sentence in the text. The system is evaluated using data from The Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) and the British Academic Written English corpus (Gardner & Nesi 2013). An experiment using these data shows that the system achieves a high degree of reliability in regard to both identifying theme-rheme boundaries and determining several of the linguistic properties of the identified themes, including syntactic nodes, theme function, markedness, mood types, and theme roles. To illustrate how the system is used, we describe an example application designed to compare collections of novice and expert academic writing in terms of thematic structure.