International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2013

This paper describes an examination of academic consultation discourse using an applied genre analytic approach (Bhatia 2002a) to inform English for academic purposes curriculum design and to contribute to interactional pragmatics and politeness research. The project employed a series of complementary genre and corpus-informed analyses, namely contextual (Tribble 2002), phase (Agar 1985), and interactional moves analysis (Swales 1990) focused on the use of framing (e.g. Goffman 1974), in conjunction with contrastive corpus analysis (Granger 1998). Data for the analyses originated in the office hours sub-corpus of MICASE (Simpson et al. 2002), and a spoken learner corpus of international teaching assistants in training (Reinhardt 2010). Results are interpreted using a model of directive language use in academic consultation discourse that considers appeals to choice and involvement as complementary rather than conflated. The genre of office hours emerges from the negotiated textualization of directive moves, framed around directive constructions using interactional politeness appeals.

This paper exemplifies an approach to learner corpus data that adopts a multifactorial definition of ‘context’. We apply a logistic regression to 2,986 attestations of genitive alternation (the squirrel’s nest vs. the nest of the squirrel) from the Chinese and German sub-sections of the International Corpus of Learner English and the British component of the International Corpus of English that were coded for 12 factors. Importantly, the speakers’ L1 was included as a predictor to be able to compare properly the native speakers with the learners as well as the two learner groups with each other. The final regression model predicts all speakers’ genitive choices very accurately (> 93%) and suggests that (i) the learners rely heavily on processing-related factors, which can be overridden by semantic constraints, and (ii) learners’ choices are differentially modulated by their L1. We close with a discussion of how this context-based, multifactorial approach goes beyond traditional learner corpus research.

This paper examines novice writers’ strategies in the (non-)representation of authorship in academic writing drawing on data from the Corpus of Academic Learner English and a native-speaker control corpus. The analysis focuses on the quantitative and qualitative use of pronouns, subject placeholders, as well as verbs and inanimate nouns that frequently occur in academic writing. The findings indicate that even advanced learners are insecure about the (non-)representation of authorship in academic texts, but lack the resources to report events and findings without mentioning an author-agent. The learner data evidence a significant overrepresentation of first person pronouns and subject placeholders as default strategies to suppress the author-agent. This imbalanced clustering is argued to be due to a significant underrepresentation of constructions with inanimate nouns as subjects that are preferred reporting devices in abstracts and research articles in the humanities. The paper concludes by addressing implications for language teaching, testing and assessment.

This exploratory study makes use of Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework to investigate transfer effects on French EFL learners’ use of lexical bundles. The study focuses on 3-word recurrent sequences that include a lexical verb in the French component of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) as compared to nine other ICLE learner sub-corpora. Results are in line with a usage-based view of language that recognizes the active role that the first language (L1) may play in the acquisition of a foreign language. The different manifestations of L1 influence displayed in the learners’ idiosyncratic use of lexical bundles are traced back to various properties of French words, including their collocational use, lexico-grammatical patterns, function, discourse conventions, and frequency of use. Following Hoey (2005), these transfer effects are subsumed under the general term of ‘transfer of primings’.

This study explores Chinese university students’ use of phrasal verbs in comparison with their American and British counterparts by utilizing a corpus of learner English and four native corpora of two English varieties and two genres (argumentative and academic writing). The results show that it is difficult to state whether the Chinese learners of English over- or underuse phrasal verbs in writing because a more striking difference emerges between the British and American students. American students tend to use many more phrasal verbs in both genres than British students and they also use a greater variety of phrasal verbs. Notwithstanding the differences, both American and British students tend to use fewer phrasal verbs in academic writing than in argumentative writing. The learners do not show a fundamental difference from the British students regarding overall frequencies of phrasal verbs; however, the learner-native writer gap does exist between the Chinese and American students.