How Students Write: A Linguistic Analysis


Book Description

Broad generalizations about "people today" are a familiar feature of first-year student writing. How Students Write brings a fresh perspective to this perennial observation, using corpus linguistics techniques. This study analyzes sentence-level patterns in student writing to develop an understanding of how students present evidence, draw connections between ideas, relate to their readers, and, ultimately, learn to construct knowledge in their writing. Drawing on both first-year and upper-level student writing, the book examines the discourse of students at different points in their education. It also distinguishes between argumentative and analytic essays to explore the way school genres and assignments shape students' choices. In focusing on sentence-level features such as hedges ("perhaps") and boosters ("definitely"), this study shows how such rhetorical choices work together to open or close opportunities for thoughtful exchanges of ideas. Attention to these features can help instructors foster civil discourse, design effective assignments, and expose and question norms of higher education.




The Language of Schooling


Book Description

This book builds on current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic studies of language in school, but adds a new dimension--the framework of functional linguistic analysis. It will enable researchers and students of language in education to rec




The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis highlights the diversity, breadth, and depth of corpus approaches to discourse analysis, compiling new and original research from notable scholars across the globe. Chapters showcase recent developments influenced by the exponential growth in linguistic computing, advances in corpus design and compilation, and the applications of sound quantitative and interpretive techniques in analyzing text and discourse patterns. Key discourse domains covered by 35 empirical chapters include: • Research contexts and methodological considerations; • Naturally occurring spoken, professional, and academic discourse; • Corpus approaches to conversational discourse, media discourse, and professional and academic writing. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis is key reading for both experienced and novice researchers working at the intersection of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as anyone undertaking study in these areas, as well as anyone interested in related fields and adjacent research approaches.




Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis


Book Description

Corpora and Rhetorically Informed Text Analysis explores applications of rhetorically informed approaches to corpus research. Bringing together contributions from scholars in a variety of fields, it takes up questions of how theories and traditions in rhetorical analysis can be integrated with corpus techniques in order to enrich our understanding of language use, variation, and history. The studies included in this volume shed light on areas as diverse as student academic writing, political discourse, and the digital humanities. These studies all make use of a dictionary-based tagger called DocuScope, which recognizes tens-of-millions of words and phrases and slots them into categories based on their rhetorical functions. While DocuScope provides a through-line that both links the studies’ various analytical procedures and primes their rhetorical insights, the volume is about more than the explanatory power of a single tool. It demonstrates how rhetorically informed approaches can complement more established corpus methodologies, underscoring their combined potential.




You Can't Write That


Book Description

A fascinating take on what schools and tests have done to English, presenting an alternative for the future of writing.




Conducting Genre-Based Research in Applied Linguistics


Book Description

This collection is a comprehensive resource on conducting research in applied linguistics involving written genres that is distinctive in its coverage of a multiplicity of interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume explores the central approaches, methodologies, analyses, and tools used in conducting genre-based research, extending the traditional focus on a single framework for defining genres by explicating the major approaches that have been invoked in applied linguistics. Chapters address a mix of commonly used methodologies (e.g., case studies, ethnographic approaches), types of analyses (e.g., metadiscourse, rhetorical move-step analysis, multidimensional analysis, lexical bundles and phrase frames, CALF measures, multimodal analysis), and studies that focus on other areas of second language (L2) teaching and learning (e.g., multilingualism, the Teaching and Learning Cycle). Taken together, the volume provides a theoretically and methodologically diverse introduction to foundational topics in genre-related research, supported by detailed discussions of the challenges and practical considerations to take into account when conducting research involving written genres. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students, faculty, and researchers in applied linguistics, particularly those working in second language acquisition, L2 writing, and genre theory and pedagogy. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.




Style and the Future of Composition Studies


Book Description

Style and the Future of CompositionStudies explores style’s potential for informing how students are taught to write well and its power as a tool for analyzing the language and discourse practices of writers and speakers in a range of contexts. Many college writing teachers operate under the belief that style still refers primarily to the kinds of issues discussed in Strunk and White’s popular but outdated book The Elements of Style. This work not only challenges this view but also offers theories and pedagogies from diverse perspectives that help teachers and students develop strategic habits and mindsets to negotiate languages, genres, and discourse conventions. The chapters explore the ways in which style directly affects—and is affected by—multiple sources of shifting disciplinary inquiry, contributing new insights by drawing on research in cultural studies, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, translingualism, and writing across the curriculum, as well as new approaches to classical rhetorical theory. The reemergence of stylistic inquiry can be used dynamically to produce new insights not only about emerging disciplinary interests but also about the study of style as a kind of language in and of itself. Style and the Future of Composition Studies demonstrates that style deserves to be a central focus of writing teaching. More than just the next style collection, the book advocates for style’s larger prominence in composition discussions generally. It will be of interest to a broad range of students and scholars of writing studies, as well as a wider set of readers in academe. Contributors: Cydney Alexis, Laura Aull, Anthony Box, Jimmy Butts, Mike Duncan, William FitzGerald, Melissa Goldthwaite, Eric House, TR Johnson, Almas Khan, Zak Lancaster, Eric Leake, Andrea Olinger, Thomas Pace, Jarron Slater, Jonathan Udelson




Improving Outcomes


Book Description

Students thrive when they are exposed to a variety of disciplinary genres, and their lives--and our institutions--are enriched by improving their writing outcomes. Taking account of evolving research, writing in the disciplines, and demographic and institutional shifts in higher education, this volume imagines new ways to improve writing outcomes by broadening the focus of assessment to wider issues of humanity and society. The essays--by contributors from diverse fields, from writing studies to nursing, engineering, and architecture--demonstrate innovative classroom practices and curricular design that place fairness and the situatedness of language at the center of writing instruction. Contributors reflect on a wide range of examples, from a disability-as-insight model to reckoning with postcolonial legacies, and the essays consider a variety of institutions, classrooms, and types of assessment, including culturally responsive assessment and peer feedback in digital environments.




Variation in University Student Writing


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive description of the situational and linguistic characteristics of undergraduate student writing, considering both assignment type and discipline. Drawing on a corpus of more than 900 undergraduate student assignments from four disciplinary groups (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences), the book combines corpus-based analyses of linguistic features with analyses of communicative purposes and text characteristics. Variation in University Writing takes a new approach to register variation by grouping assignments by their communicative purpose (to argue, to explain, to compare, to describe, to narrate a personal event, to give a procedural recount, to give personal advice, and to propose), rather than register categories. A multidimensional analysis provides a detailed description of the linguistic patterns of undergraduate writing. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to teachers of writing, instructors of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and researchers of university writing.




Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies


Book Description

This book invites readers to reconsider how writing studies researchers work with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) on behalf of their communities and argues that engaging with IRBs during the research design process helps practitioners conduct research more quickly and effectively Using empirical data from both writing studies and extra-disciplinary contexts, Dr. Johanna Phelps presents findings from two discipline-wide studies, as well as metadata from two IRBs, to develop a principled engagement framework for writing studies researchers to interact with their communities This engaging and timely exploration of research design will be an important resource for scholars and students of writing studies; rhetoric and composition; technical and professional communication; cultural rhetoric; literacy studies; research design; research methodologies; research ethics; IRBs; justice; and critical theory