Francisco Martínez

Contrasting learner corpora: the use of modal and reporting verbs in the expression of writer stance

This article presents part of the results from research carried out by the SPICLE team on argumentative texts written in English by student writers, both native and non-native speakers from several L1 backgrounds. The aim of the study was to compare how these writers construct stance by examining their use of devices of evidentiality, specifically, modal verbs (can, could, may, might and must) and nine reporting verbs (suggest, wonder, argue, explain, express, recognise, say, show, and state). The texts of American university writers were contrasted with those produced by five EFL groups (speakers of Spanish, Dutch, Italian, French and German). The results showed that the EFL writers either overuse or underuse modal verbs in comparison with the American writers. Regarding the use of reporting verbs, native writers use a wider range of verbs, many of which carry a higher pragmatic import for stance taking. This research is significant not only for the comparison of typological and pragmatic differences but also for the study of interlanguage features and the teaching and learning of writing conventions.

Formulating Writer Stance: A Contrastive Study of EFL Learner Corpora

The emergence of English as the predominant foreign language required for academic work in Spain has brought about a shift in the EFL teachers’ priorities regarding the teaching of writing skills. Since the early 1990s, the SPICLE1 writing research team at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid has studied argumentative texts produced by Spanish university writers, American university students and expert writers (signed newspaper editorials) in an attempt to tease apart the multiple factors influencing EFL text, including transfer of L1 features – linguistic (typological) as well as those involving the influence of L1 rhetorical conventions – novice writer aspects, EFL proficiency and educational background. We present two studies which show how these factors may subtly coalesce in order to produce certain discourse effects, especially concerning writer stance, as shown in the second study presented here. The results will be of interest to teachers of ESL and EFL writing and researchers in contrastive rhetoric.

A Contrastive Functional Analysis of Errors in Spanish EFL University Writers’ Argumentative Texts: Corpus-based Study

This article reports on the initial results of the Spanish data from the ICLE Error Tagging Project (Louvain). The corpus consists of 50,000 words of texts (argumentative essays and literature examinations) written by English Philology students at two Madrid universities. The tag categories were: Form (F), Grammar (G), Lexico-grammatical aspects (X), Lexis (L), Word (W), Punctuation (Q), Register (R) and Style (S). All tags were triple checked by various native-speaker raters. The results show that grammar (35%) and lexis (28%) account for two-thirds of the errors, while punctuation accounts for 11%, form 9%, word 7%, lexico-grammatical factors 6% and register and style for 2% and 1%, respectively. The study proposes various areas of investigation which may be useful to others who are working with English-Spanish contrastive data: discourse/pragmatics; semantics; (lexis)/lexico-grammar; syntax; phonetics/writing systems; and non-structural factors (writing conventions).