Michigan Corpus Of Academic Spoken English Research Articles

A Contrastive Study of Boosters in a Corpus of Academic Spoken English

The present study intended to investigate the use of boosters in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). It examined whether native and non-native speakers of English differed from each other in boosters’ use based on Hyland (2005) across academic divisions, levels of interactivity, genders, and academic roles in academic spoken English. The results of the UNIANOVA inferential test revealed that not only did native speakers of English utilize boosters more frequently than non-native ones across the four variables, but they also employed boosters in a way that was specific to academic divisions, levels of interactivity, genders, and academic roles. Besides the influence of culture and proficiency on boosters’ use, this corpus analysis study found that native English speakers put their statements under focus so that they sound convincing to the audience in soft sciences more than the hard ones. It also indicated native speakers’ greater attempt to convince their audience of the truth in their propositions, show new pieces of information as true, and back their own manipulative or persuasive purposes in highly interactive speeches more than the other levels of interactivity. Furthermore, it was shown that female native speakers exceeded to express opinions, state a suggestion with confidence in their knowledge of the topic, and minimize the possibility of accepting other options in academic spoken English of the MICASE. Ultimately, it illustrated that native academic speakers of English of faculty role rated higher to strengthen their existence, position, argument, claims, and commitment to their speech.

If you look at the table…: Directives in conference presentations and university lectures

AbstractThis paper investigates differences in the characteristic form, frequency and role of directives in two spoken academic genres, conference presentations and university lectures. The study also reports the existence of differences between English native and non‐native speakers in the way they use directives at conferences. Data consist of a self‐compiled corpus of conference talks and a comparable corpus of lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Results show that, comparatively, directives in lectures are stronger and less mitigated than in conference presentations. Conference speakers in our study make the intrinsic imposition in directives more palatable for the peer audience by using milder directive forms, deploying indirectness and stressing communal membership. Non‐native speakers' directives show interesting similarities with those in lectures, a possible sign of overlapping or confusion of two major genres in the “overpopulated” generic world of academics. Findings on conference presentations and lectures are also compared with existing evidence on directives in written research articles: some characteristic roles of directives in writing are irrelevant in speech, while others, e.g. integrating visuals in the presentation and reactivating background and previously constructed content, are central to the spoken genres but irrelevant to writing.

The Pragmatic Functions of I think in Different Genres

The present paper aims to examine the occurrence of I think in different genres. A collected data of I think from graduate student research interview and objectivism group study within Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is analyzed. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are included and the selection tool Antconc 3.4.4 are adopted in the study. By using concordance, all the context including I think are collected. Meanwhile, some phrases (such as I think so, what I think, I think of, etc.) are deleted from the analysis. It is found that I think in different positions and with different collocations fulfill different pragmatic functions respectively. The phrase I think is very frequent in GSRI and OSG, which is due to the nature of the discourse, where the participants are engaged in the communication. From the perspective of syntax and collocation, a lot of examples are analyzed in details. It is found that the interpretation of I think cannot be reached without exploring its linguistic context. In addition, a more detailed observation of linguistic context of I think in OSG and GSRI is explored. Some epistemic certainty (certainly, really, etc.) are included in research interview, with the function of emphasis and deliberation. The study might help to reconsider the functions of I think in different genres.

An Analysis of the Multiword Units Presented in IELTS Speaking Preparation Books Published by Iranian Authors

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to be representative of the authentic language that people use in real world. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed, and several practical suggestions are made in order to inform teachers, material developers, and syllabus designers of the importance of related corpus linguistic studies.

Stories and scenarios: Lecturers’ use of fantastic hypothetical events

A number of studies have examined the occurrence of stories in lecture contexts, and have suggested that stories can encourage student engagement and the acquisition and retention of lecture information content. Some of these studies have analysed story structures in terms of Labov and Waletzky's model (1967) or the more elaborate model developed by Martin (2008). Such models work well for stories that recount events that took place in past time, but they do not capture another type of story, the hypothetical scenario, sufficiently well. Drawing on prior research into stories in lecture discourse, and ‘Imagining Scenarios’ (Ädel 2010, 2012), we identify and describe passages in lectures where listeners are invited to imagine a fantastic hypothetical situation. Scenario identification criteria were developed, and examples were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Novice EMI lecturers may understandably be nervous about straying away from the delivery of facts and into the realms of fantasy, but our findings suggest that scenario-telling is part of the experienced lecturer's repertoire, and is an engaging way of elaborating abstract technical terms, concepts, or arguments central to a disciplinary topic.

Gender Differences in Disagreement Strategies in Oral Academic Discourse

The research aims to identify the gender differences in expressing disagreement in oral academic discourse. Examples containing explicit and implicit ways of expressing disagreement are collected through reading a corpus of texts chosen from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), including speech genres of seminar, discussion, defense of the dissertation and colloquium. Our study confirmed previous observations that utterances of explicit unmitigated disagreement or criticism are generally not typical of the American academic environment. The research findings reveal that both men and women tend to express disagreement explicitly using basic mitigation strategies. Unmitigated utterances with straightforward disagreement are infrequent and used mainly by teachers, which is most likely due to the other sociolinguistic variables apart from gender, and in particular by the status of speakers in teacher-student situations. Contrary to previous claims, men prefer the tactics of down-toning, represented by language patterns with the meaning of problematic certainty and subjectivity, as well as the use of lexical hedges. Female teachers recurrently use particular ways of implementing the tactics of mitigating implicit expression of disagreement, which may be specific of their individual styles. The research confirms that the distribution of particular language patterns across speakers should be taken into account when studying the gender aspects of communication.

Intensification of Affirmativity: Definitely as a Discourse Marker in Spoken Conversation

From a pragmatic-analytic perspective, this study examines how definitely as a discourse marker (DM) functions in spoken conversation. Three corpora, namely the British National Corpus (BNC), the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBC) are used to investigate the multifarious pragmatic functions of definitely between interlocutors. It is practicable to use definitely as a DM in pre-front field and it frequently occurs in everyday language use. In light of the three corpora with respect to the DM definitely introduced in this study, there may be divergent types of definitely that occur in spoken conversation. Based on my dataset, definitely exhibits four types of pre-front use. For instance, definitely appears by itself and it also occurs with specific discourse particles such as oh, yeah, and yes and with negators such as no and not. Lastly, its repetitive pre-front use is also found. The analysis from a pragmatic perspective in regard to definitely as a DM proposes that definitely can play a great variety of pragmatic functions such as those of acting as a pre-closing device, or devices to express and solicit approval, consensus, eagerness, stimulation, gratification, floor-holding, topic-shift, intimacy, and bridging between interlocutors in spoken conversation. From perspectives of semantic and pragmatic analysis, definitely has an affirmative semantic connotation and it could strongly serve as an affirmative conversational response device.

Pedagogical Implications of Corpus-based Approaches to ELT in Pakistan

<p>The advent of corpora has opened new vistas for language study and restructured linguists’ and academicians’ approaches to lexicography and English language teaching (ELT). After 1980s, the use of online language corpora and computer tools garnered tremendous attention of English language teachers and academicians. Keeping in view the modern trends and needs of learners, this research focused on the practical implications of online corpora for ELT and its utility in the Pakistani context. Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is used as a reference corpus for this research. MICASE is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed speech (almost two hundred hours of recording). The transcribed data of MICASE includes wide range of speech events like seminars, lectures, advisory meetings and lab sessions. The study identified the utility of lexical items at syntactic level and its usage in various contexts. Furthermore, the layers of meanings and uses of lexicons through in-depth study of right and left collocates were explored in the reference corpus. The results showed that lexicons can be used as noun, verb and adjective depending upon the context of the study and right and left collocates play a significant role in understanding the meanings of lexical items in various contexts. Thus, this strategy can be fruitful for English language learners and academic discourse community who are interested in understanding the versatile uses of lexical items and their contextual meaning.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> collocate, context, corpus, ELT, MICASE</p>

ГЕНДЕРНЫЙ АСПЕКТ ВЫРАЖЕНИЯ НЕСОГЛАСИЯ В УСТНОМ АКАДЕМИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ КОРПУСА MICASE)

The article analyzes the specificity of expressing disagreement from the viewpoint of the gender aspect by the example of Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The author examines a communicative situation, in which the teacher corrects the student’s mistake or disagrees with his opinion. The paper describes the basic means to explicate disagreement and pragmatic linguistic means to soften the categoricity of a statement in English scientific discourse. The analysis identified insignificant gender differences that testify for the necessity of the further verification of the stereotypes of male and female speech behaviour.

‘Two rules are at play when it comes to none’: A corpus-based analysis of singular versus plural none

This paper identifies discrepancies between prescriptive grammar rules concerning the number of the indefinite pronoun none and the actual use of this pronoun in modern academic English as shown in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Whereas prescriptive rules state that the number of none is determined by its referent or by the user's desired effect, the analyses of the MICASE and MICUSP search results suggest that, regardless of the modality of discourse, (1) the number of none with an anaphoric referent is determined by the number of its referent and (2) the principle of proximity applies without exception when none is used as part of a ‘none of + singular noun/pronoun’ phrase and applies frequently but not always when followed by an ‘of + plural noun/pronoun’ phrase.

Language assessment and the inseparability of lexis and grammar: Focus on the construct of speaking

This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests, the paper then reviews rubrics of popular high-stakes speaking tests and critically discusses how far these rubrics capture the central aspects of spoken language identified in the corpus analyses as well as the centrality of phraseology in language. It closes with recommendations for speaking assessment in the light of this characterization of real-world spoken lexicogrammar.

Effectiveness of Mobile Applications in Vocabulary Teaching

Smartphones are increasingly becoming an ordinary part of our daily lives. With their remarkable capacity, applications used in these devices are extremely varied. In terms of language teaching, the use of these applications has opened new windows of opportunity, innovatively shaping the way instructors teach and students learn. This 4 week-long study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a mobile application on teaching 40 figurative idioms from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) corpus compared to traditional activities. Quasi-experimental research design with pretest and posttest was employed to determine the differences between the scores of the control (n=25) and the experimental group (n=25) formed with convenience sampling. Results indicate that participants in the experimental group performed significantly better in the posttest, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mobile application used in this study on learning idioms. The study also provides recommendations towards the use of mobile applications in teaching vocabulary.

A Corpus-Based Study on the Performance of the Suggestion Speech Act by Chinese EFL Learners

The suggestion speech act has not been as widely studied as other speech acts such as requests and apologies, and fewer studies of suggestions have focused on Chinese EFL learners as a target group. This study, based on the spoken data of the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL) and the online Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), aims to investigate how Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners make suggestions in English, through comparing the linguistic features of suggestion speech act as well as suggestion strategies used by Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers. Results show that (1) Chinese learners used significantly more modal verbs, explicit performatives and conditional structures than native English speakers, whereas native English speakers used more Wh-questions and Let’s structures than Chinese learners, and (2) in terms of suggestion strategies, the Chinese EFL learners resembled native English speakers in the use of direct suggestion strategies, but the Chinese EFL learners used significantly more conventionalized indirect suggestion strategies than native English speakers.

On the other side: formulaic organizing chunks in spoken and written academic ELF

Abstract An ongoing discussion in ELF research is the ability of ELF speakers to store and retrieve holistic chunks of language, facilitating efficient and fluent production of speech. These questions involve the frequency effects of formulaic chunks of language and their varying degrees of entrenchment for ELF users. In addition, the variable forms in which these chunks may be attested can be treated as approximations of conventional chunks, while serving identical functions. This study addresses these issues by investigating high-frequency organizing chunks in ELF corpora using the Linear Unit Grammar (LUG) framework (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006). Drawing data from the ELFA corpus of spoken academic ELF, the study also considers organizing chunks in written academic ELF from the nascent WrELFA corpus. With ENL comparison data taken from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), findings are presented on the forms and frequencies of textual and interactive organizing chunks in ELF, with implications for the reality of frequency effects and their connection to distributions of approximated chunks. The lower frequency, organizing chunks showed a higher rate of approximation and number of unique forms, while the higher frequency chunks were primarily attested in conventional forms both in written and spoken ELF.

Frequencies of vague expressions in English as an academic lingua franca

Abstract This article explores the use of vague expressions in English spoken as a lingua franca in academic settings. The main focus is on the frequencies of general extenders (e.g. and so on), vague classifiers (e.g. some sort of), metadiscourse particles (e.g. so to say), and indefinite prepositional phrases (e.g. in a way). The aim of the study is to investigate how non-native speakers using English as a lingua franca employ and modify their repertoire of lexical vagueness in accordance with the speech event type and academic domain. Furthermore, the study also presents comparisons between the frequencies of vague expressions in lingua franca and native speaker data. The main sample is drawn from the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) corpus and the findings are contrasted with a comparable data from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The findings show that, on the whole, lingua franca speakers employ vague expressions almost twice as frequently as native speakers, although the range of different expressions was found to be narrower in the lingua franca data. Vague expressions were most commonly found in dialogic speech events such as doctoral defense and seminar discussions. As regards academic domains, vague expressions were most often used in technology, while in humanities and social sciences their frequencies were lower.

The use of questions by professors in lectures given in English: Influences of disciplinary cultures

Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors’ use of questions in terms of both their forms and functions. The corpus used in this study consists of 15 small-class lectures from three academic divisions: Humanities & Arts (HA), Social Sciences & Education (SS) and Physical Sciences & Engineering (PS). These data are a subset of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE).Previous studies on academic spoken English have reported that, compared with other contextual factors, the disciplinary culture seems to exert a more critical influence on the use of various linguistic features. However, the results of this study show far more similarities than differences across different disciplines. Based on the major findings pertaining to the use of question forms and functions across the three divisions, it is suggested that for questions in academic lectures at the tertiary level, the influence of genre seems to outweigh that of disciplinary culture.

The frequency and functions of just in British academic spoken English

This study investigates the frequency and functions of ‘ just’ in British academic spoken English. It adopts the meanings of ‘ just’ established by Lindemann and Mauranen, 2001, taken from the occurrences of ‘ just’ across five speech events in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to see if they also apply to occurrences of ‘ just’ in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. One fifth of the mostly monologic lecture data and one fifth of the more interactive seminar data was examined across the four disciplines of the BASE corpus. Results from corpus examples show that as in MICASE, ’just’ occurs most in academic spoken English as a minimizer or mitigator, across all four disciplinary groupings, often in metadiscursive or ‘teacher talk’ frames. Although the highest frequency of ‘ just’ was in Physical Sciences, there is little difference in the function of ‘just’ among the different disciplinary groupings. There is, however, some difference between student and lecturer use of ‘ just’, showing that there is a place for the teaching of ‘ just’ in English for academic purposes (EAP) classes for students preparing for university study.

An Effective Way to Use Corpus Exercises to Learn Grammar Basics in English

Computer-based data driven learning (DDL) is becoming gradually more prevalent in L2 classrooms, and studies have shown that DDL exercises can be effective even at the beginner level in teaching vocabulary and grammar (Chujo & Oghigian, 2006, 2008). In addition, paperbased DDL studies are gaining ground (Boulton, 2008b), so that even without computers, students are able to explore concordance lines to identify recurring grammatical features and word derivations and to learn how to induce generalizations from the samples to the language in general. In this study, the researchers have developed a series of computer-based and paperbased DDL exercises focused on grammar basics and using a four-step approach that is both inductive and deductive. Course evaluations indicate statistically significant gains in most areas, and students report an overall positive rating on questionnaires. The benefits of data driven learning (DDL) or corpus-based exercises in the L2 classroom are widely recognized. Leech tells us that “... the corpus, as an information source, fits in very well with the dominant trend...from teaching as imparting knowledge to teaching as mediated learning” (1997, p. 2); others point to advantages of using DDL: authenticity; active, studentcentered learning where the learner has control of the learning process; and the powerful and motivating discovery aspect in which the learner acts as researcher (Braun, 2008; Huang, 2008; Hunston, 2002; Johns, 1994; O’Keefe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007; Stevens, 1995). There is no question that corpus-based learning is gaining ground in second language acquisition; however, Boulton’s (2008a) survey of 50 DDL studies shows only four at the beginner level. Corpus use at the beginning level, either directly on computers or with paper-based material, is the focus of this study. In the first section of this paper, several considerations for using DDL in the beginner level L2 classroom are provided. Next, examples of computer-based and paper-based vocabulary and grammar exercises are given in the second section. These exercises have been used in the Nihon University Study, described in the third section. In the final section, the advantages and disadvantages of computer-based and paper-based corpus exercises are discussed. Language Education in Asia, 2010, 1(1), 200-214. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/10/V1/A17/Oghigian_Chujo Language Education in Asia, Volume 1, 2010 Oghigian and Chujo Page 201 Considerations for DDL in the Beginner L2 Classroom The authors posit that DDL can be successful with beginner level students, although there are several important considerations. Choosing an appropriate corpus. The first and arguably most essential consideration for classroom DDL exercises is choosing the appropriate corpus with regard to size, relevance, and accessibility. Size. The largest and certainly most accessible corpus is “the Internet,” estimated at 100 trillion words in 2007 by Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google (Norvig, 2007). The use of an immense corpus this size risks “drowning [learners] in data” (Tribble, 1997, p. 2); this risk is present even with corpora of only a few million words. Comparatively smaller corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC) with 100 million words, or the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) with 410 million words, can be somewhat more manageable. With these corpora, it is easier to narrow the focus to a particular and more practical language function, context, or register. For example, Biber (2009) points out that conversation generally contains numerous embedded clauses, whereas writing contains many more phrases, especially noun phrases. Therefore, the focus of a communication or writing class might be directed to smaller and more relevant, specialized spoken or written corpora, respectively. Sub-corpora can further narrow the focus to types of spoken or written discourse, for example, academic discourse (e.g., from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE)), or academic-sourced writing (e.g., the COCA academic register). Tribble (1997) advocates creating micro-corpora, but this may be overly ambitious for many teachers, particularly given copyright issues, and may be unnecessary, given the accessibility of many corpora and corpus tools. It is also important to note that with a corpus that is too small, there may not be a sufficient number of examples for learners to see a pattern. A sample of corpora and corpus tools is shown in Table 1; for a comprehensive list of corpora, corpus tools and related information, see David Lee’s Bookmarks for Corpus-based Linguists website.

Producing fact, affect and identity in architecture critiques a discourse analysis of student and faculty discourse interaction

Among the academic genres that architecture students must learn to produce, the architecture critique or crit is a significant moment in student enculturation to disciplinary norms. Students must simultaneously re-present the visuals representing the conceptual design of a built environment space and negotiate the social and affective dimensions of peer critique. Academic skills textbooks emphasize the informational structuring and staging of presentations while paying little attention to the social and affective dimension of the group social interaction. Building on recent linguistic critique of the separation of cognition and affect (including emotion), this study focuses on the affective and factual nature of the discourse of architecture critique and its constitutive role in student and faculty identities. I examine extracts from four architecture critique presentations recorded during a two hour session (123 minutes) at the University of Michigan for the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). This discourse analysis demonstrates how fact and affect (including emotion) and identity is produced in the turns of student presenters. The paper concludes with how a discursive focus may contribute to more transparent student and faculty approaches to managing emotion.

Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word-Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse. * Eileen Fitzpatrick (ed.).

This volume contains 15 selected papers originally presented at the 5th North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics at Montclair State University, New Jersey, in 2004. Focusing on the use of corpora to study domains, ‘beyond the word’, the symposium covered a wide range of topics, from corpus creation, discourse and register variation to applications in language or medical education, most of them involving tools, approaches, and statistical techniques new to corpus linguistics. The editor uses the phrase ‘beyond the word’ to indicate linguistic productions longer than the word, from phrases to pragmatics. The papers are arranged in two sections: one on syntactic analysis tools and corpus annotation, and a second on applications in pedagogy and linguistic analysis. In the first chapter, Barrett, Greenberg, and Schwartz report on exploratory research in automatically selecting documents from distinct domains for machine translation corpora in order to improve results in machine translation. Their method relies on the assumption that texts belonging to different domains have a different syntactic profile. A comparison of part-of-speech tag densities in seven hand-selected documents in four different domains (medical, financial, military, and narrative) suggests that there is a direct correlation between texts from the same domain. This method could also be applied to genre, register or authorship analysis, and in the second chapter, Grieve-Smith investigates whether it is actually possible to exclude grammatical sources of covariation from a list of markers of register, genre or style variation. Using Douglas Biber's (e.g. Biber, 1988) notion of the ‘envelope of variation’, where grammatical features are counted ‘as a proportion of the opportunities for these features to be produced’ (p. 21), Grieve-Smith analyses two features that correlate but do not co–vary according to Biber in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) corpus.