British Academic Written English Research Articles

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.

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.

Syntactic and Semantic Properties of on the Contrary in British University Student Essay Writing: A Corpus-Based Systemic Functional Analysis

In contrast to previous descriptions of on the contrary (OTC) as a corrective or replacive marker requiring explicit negation, this study revealed that more than 50% of the occasions the expression was used in British tertiary level student essays, represented by British academic written English (BAWE) corpus, were not associated with a preceding negation. The frequency information provides a starting point for the qualitative analysis of the two functional types of OTC, i.e., adversative versus replacive. The notions of (topical) theme, rheme, and focus within systemic functional linguistics were proposed as descriptive frameworks to identify the distinct characteristics of each functional type. The replacive type typically employs a preceding negation and a topical theme equal to that of the clause complex preceding the conjunctive, whereas the adversative type is distinguished by the use of a different topical theme and a contrastive rheme. The analysis conducted in this study provided language teachers with a model for helping students comprehend logic semantics expressed by conjunctives by analyzing semantic features of connected clause complexes.

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.

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.

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.

Sources for courses: Metadiscourse and the role of citation in student writing

Although a great deal has been written about citation in expert research writing, and about novice students’ acquisition of citation skills for the purposes of argumentation, little is known about the typical uses of citation in undergraduate student coursework, in different disciplines, and at different levels of study. This paper describes how typical citations patterns can be retrieved from undergraduate assignments in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, and examines the linguistic features of these patterns with reference to the types of sources cited and the different functions of citation. It reveals a wide variety of patterns and purposes, well beyond those described in student writing guides. Students’ use of citation was found to increase as they progressed through the years of undergraduate study, although citation was not an essential feature of every type of writing assignment, and was performed in different ways according to discipline. The search queries presented in the paper can be used by researchers, students, and writing tutors as a basis for further investigation into citation practices. The findings also have implications for teaching, and the training of EAP practitioners.

Shell-noun use in disciplinary student writing: A multifaceted analysis of problem and way in third-year undergraduate writing across three disciplines

Despite the growth of interest in the phenomenon of shell-nounhood in academic discourse, research has been primarily concerned with published research articles. This contrasts with the limited attention that it has received in the study of disciplinary student writing. This study explores discipline specificity in student writing through an in-depth multifaceted analysis of two frequent shell nouns, problem and way, in a sample of Year 3 undergraduate native writing from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus in three disciplines: Sociology, Business and Engineering. The lexical, syntactico-semantic and textual variables coded yield results that conform to the divide between the more experimental approach of the Physical Sciences and the more interpretive one taken in the Social Sciences. The examination of data in this paper helps identify distinctive disciplinary trends at various levels of linguistic analysis, many of which could then be further inspected through more automated pattern-driven investigations of larger datasets.

WHAT IS VALUABLE IN THE ACADEME: CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

The paper focuses on the corpus-based analysis of academic discourse values. The research aim is to reveal how teachers transmit academic discourse values through their everyday interactions with students (during lectures, seminars) and to reveal, which values are relevant for the students (based on the analysis of their essays, research papers and some such). The research relies on corpus-based approach and primary methods used are a semantic analysis and a context analysis as well as definition analysis of evaluative means. The research results have revealed that various values play important role in academic interactions and shape the image of the academe – on the local as well as on the global scale. The study of the contexts containing the word valuable in British National Corpus (Davis, 2008-), British Academic Spoken English (Nesi, & Thompson, 2000-), British Academic Written English (Nesi, 2008-), Corpus of Russian Student Texts (Rakhilina, Zevakhina, & Dzhakupova, 2013-) and Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (2002-) has revealed that the values of academic discourse can be subdivided into six domains: emotional, cognitive, educational, research-related, academic life-related, topic- / area-related. The further applicability of research findings manifests itself in various avenues of research: linguistics (evaluative means), axiology (cross-disciplinary study of values), teaching practices (academic discourse genres) and others.

Stance and modals of obligation and necessity in academic writing

Abstract Variation has been demonstrated in modal use between written and spoken registers and between disciplines. This article investigates variation within a discipline by comparing modals of obligation and necessity used in three science genres. Obligation modals project strong authoritative stance, thus contrasting with the tendency in academic writing towards tentativeness. The modal auxiliaries must and should and quasi-modals have to and need to are investigated using student writing from the BAWE (British Academic Written English) corpus and a corpus of published research articles. Findings include a dearth of obligation modals in the empirical genres (research articles and laboratory reports). Also a greater prominence was found of dynamic modal meaning (where necessity arises from circumstances) rather than deontic meaning (where the necessity arises from human authority or rules). A further finding is the prominence of objective meaning in the science register compared with the International Corpus of English (Collins 2009a).

Beyond the noun postmodifier: prepositional phrases preceded by nouns in spoken and written academic English

This study seeks to investigate variation in the use of prepositional phrases following noun phrases in spoken and written academic English. In order to do so, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus were used. The results of this analysis have revealed that there is a specific set of prepositions that control prepositional phrases (of, in, to, for). Nevertheless, contrary to previous studies the findings of this investigation show that prepositional phrases following nouns are more common in spoken registers than written registers. These results might be an indicator of different levels of expertise, or the use of genitives in spoken registers.

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

Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education

Recent scholarship on phraseology in academic writing has concentrated on phrase frames (p-frames), which are recurrent sequences of identical words with a variable slot. The present study purports to identify the key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. The corpus used in this research consists of the discussions of research articles published from 2013 to 2018 in thirteen leading journals in the field of higher education. The p-frames extracted by KfNgram were compared with the British Academic Written English Corpus11The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (www.coventry.ac.uk/bawe) was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes, under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800). to find those phraseological items specific to the discipline of higher education, resulting in a list of 58 four-word and 40 five-word p-frames that are key to the research article discussion in this field. Moreover, the majority of these frames were found to be non-verb content word phrases, and referential expressions in terms of discourse function. Pedagogical implications for discipline-specific writing programs are offered.

Metadiscourse Use in L2 Student Essay Writing: A Longitudinal Cross-Contextual Comparison

Abstract This paper investigates developmental patterns of metadiscourse use in Chinese students’ EAP writing in an English medium university, in comparison with English majors’ EFL writing in mainstream state universities and L1 student writing in UK universities. Taking a longitudinal and cross-contextual perspective, the study explores corpora of L1 and L2 student writing gathered from three sources: EAP essays written by Chinese undergraduate students at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university; argumentative essays written by English majors in the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL); and academic essays of English L1 students from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse was adopted to identify interactive and interactional devices in each corpus, and results were compared between different levels as well as across the corpora to reveal developmental features. Findings show marked differences in metadiscourse use between Chinese EMI students’ EAP essays and English major students’ EFL essays in mainstream state universities, whereas a similar pattern of use occurred in EAP essays and English L1 student academic essays. Significant changes were also found between different year levels in two L2 essay corpora. The findings suggest that metadiscourse use in L2 writing had developmental trajectories distinctive to different institutional contexts, with EAP instruction in the EMI institution having mixed effects on Chinese students’ awareness and use of metadiscourse in essay writing.

A quantitative analysis of collocations in Brazilian and British students’ academic writing

A língua é formulaica por natureza, o que significa que a redação adequada vai além do conhecimento de palavras isoladas. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a diferença quantitativa do uso de colocações da Academic Collocation List (ACL) em dois corpora acadêmicos, o British Academic Written English (BAWE) e o Brazilian Academic Written English (BrAWE). Para realizar essa análise, utilizamos a Linguística de Corpus como metodologia. Os resultados apontam que poucas colocações do ACL se mostraram estatisticamente significativas quando investigamos o corpus BrAWE em comparação com o BAWE, indicando que os brasileiros utilizam as colocações acadêmicas de forma adequada quando comparados aos britânicos. Esta pesquisa ressalta a importância do foco em colocações nos contextos de ensino de inglês acadêmico, uma vez que elas ajudam a garantir a convencionalidade no uso da língua. Além disso, observamos que britânicos e brasileiros usam colocações acadêmicas que não estão necessariamente presentes na ACL, sugerindo um possível descompasso entre o que é prescrito e o que é realmente usado na linguagem autêntica.

A STUDY OF ACADEMIC GENRE: EXPLORING WRITING IN ENGLISH FOR UNIVERSITY PURPOSES WITH VIETNAMESE STUDENTS

Higher Education students in Vietnam are increasingly expected to write in English for university and professional purposes. This study identified the written texts in English that postgraduates had written for university purposes and explored their perceptions of or attitudes towards these. Using a classification of university genres developed from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus, ten case study students showed how their experiences of genres at lower levels of education had been heavily standardised. At undergraduate levels, English-major students and students studying in English-medium instruction were expected to write a wider variety of genres. At postgraduate levels, however, students from all subject areas were also required to write some genres, especially scientific research reports in English. Students’ attitudes towards assignments were influenced by effort and achievement levels, and the extent to which they felt prepared to write the type of text required. A number of key writing challenges were identified by students via self-reports and think-aloud protocol methods. Many students felt unprepared to write the genres expected of them, including the need for academic vocabulary and critical thinking. Findings indicated that non-English major postgraduate students (especially those enrolled on science-based courses) could benefit from a genre-sensitive pedagogy at late undergraduate or early postgraduate level.

“HARTA” de noveles: un corpus de español académico

The aim of this review is to account for the process of compilation and codification of the corpus HARTA-Noveles. This corpus was created as part of the research project titled “Corpus-based study of lexical combinations of academic Spanish for the development of a computational tool for academic writing assistance” (HARTA) [1] , under the direction of Margarita Alonso Ramos (University of La Coruna). The corpus consists of representative samples of essays produced by Spanish university students and gathered with the purpose of studying academic lexical combinations (CLA) [2] , i.e., recurrent segments specific to the academic domain, along with collocations, discourse markers and other multiword expressions. Inspired by the BAWE corpus (British Academic Written English), HARTA-No-veles is formed exclusively by final project texts (for the degrees) and dissertations (for the masters) selected from different public repositories of Spanish universities and from various scientific domains. These texts have been annotated with an specific system adapted from that followed by the Royal Academy in CORPES [3] . [1] Acronimo del nombre en espanol del proyecto: “Estudio de las combinaciones lexicas del espanol academico basado en corpus para una Herramienta de Ayuda a la Redaccion de Textos Academicos” (HARTA). [2] En espanol, combinaciones lexicas academicas (CLA). [3] Corpus del Espanol del Siglo XXI (CORPES).