Susan Conrad

Speaking and Writing in the University: A Multidimensional Comparison

The dozens of studies on academic discourse carried out over the past 20 years have mostly focused on written academic prose (usually the technical research article in science or medicine) or on academic lectures. Other registers that may be more important for students adjusting to university life, such as textbooks, have received surprisingly little attention, and spoken registers such as study groups or on-campus service encounters have been virtually ignored. To explain more fully the nature of the tasks that incoming international students encounter, this article undertakes a comprehensive linguistic description of the range of spoken and written registers at U.S. universities. Specifically, the article describes a multidimensional analysis of register variation in the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. The analysis shows that spoken registers are fundamentally different from written ones in university contexts, regardless of purpose. Some of the register characterizations are particularly surprising. For example, classroom teaching was similar to the conversational registers in many respects, and departmental brochures and Web pages were as informationally dense as textbooks. The article discusses the implications of these findings for pedagogy and future research.

Will Corpus Linguistics Revolutionize Grammar Teaching in the 21st Century

* In the final decades of the 20th century, exciting developments began taking place in grammar teaching and research. First, there was renewed interest in an explicit focus on form in the classroom; publications argued that students benefit from grammar instruction (e.g., CelceMurcia, 1991a, 1991b; Celce-Murcia, D6rnyei, & Thurrell, 1997; Ellis, 1998; Master, 1994) and suggested new approaches to grammar pedagogy, such as teaching grammar in a discourse context (Celce-Murcia, 1991a, 1991b) and designing grammatical consciousness-raising or input analysis activities (e.g., Ellis, 1993, 1995; Fotos, 1993, 1994; Rutherford, 1987; Sharwood Smith, 1988; Yip, 1994). At the same time, computer technology was making it possible to conduct grammar studies of unprecedented scope and complexity. This research is part of corpus linguistics, the empirical study of language relying on computer-assisted techniques to analyze large, principled databases of naturally occurring language. Although only one aspect of corpus linguistics-concordancing-tended to be emphasized for classrooms (see, e.g., Cobb, 1997; Johns, 1986, 1994; Stevens, 1995), most ESL grammarians would agree that, by the end of the 20th century, corpus linguistics was also radically changing grammar research. Compare, for example, Longmans two reference grammars. The first, published in 1985 (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik), contained limited reports of corpus studies to supplement traditional intuitionbased description whereas the second, published in 1999 (Biber,

The Importance of Corpus-Based Research for Language Teachers.

Abstract In the past decade, interest has grown tremendously in the use of language corpora and computer tools for language education. Unfortunately, however, publications addressed to teachers have focused almost entirely on concordancing and lexical or lexico-grammatical studies. They have not introduced teachers to more comprehensive types of corpus-based studies, even though these studies also have important implications for teaching. In this article, I introduce the fundamental characteristics of corpus-based research and then illustrate such research with a study of a complex grammatical feature in English: linking adverbials (i.e. connecting expressions such as therefore and in other words). With this sample study I show that corpus-based research is useful even with features that cannot be studied with automatic computer programs. In addition, this research facilitates investigation of multiple characteristics of a feature so that we can gain a fuller understanding of its use. Specifically, for linking adverbials I examine frequency, semantic category, grammatical structure, placement within the clause, the specific item used, and variation across registers (academic prose, newspaper reportage, fiction, and conversation)—as well as the interactions of these characteristics. I also illustrate how this corpus-based study can lead to more principled classroom materials and activities.

Investigating academic texts with corpus-based techniques: An example from biology☆

In this article, I illustrate how corpus-based techniques can broaden our understanding of variation in academic discourse by allowing us to examine patterns in a larger number of linguistics features and a larger amount of text than in previous studies. Specifically, I present a study that uses multidimensional analysis to investigate variation across three types of texts: common composition textbook selections, textbooks used in ecology courses, and professional research articles in ecology. The findings highlight the complex relationships that exist among academic texts, providing multiple perspectives on differences and similarities in language use that cannot be provided by other approaches.

The frequency and use of lexical bundles in conversation and academic prose

Susan Conrad / Douglas Biber The Frequency and Use of Lexical Bundles in Conversation and Academic Prose

Corpus-Based Investigations of Language Use

On a basic level, there are two main areas of study within linguistics: language structure and language use. Language practioners as well as theoreticians must be concerned with both areas; that is, they need a full understanding of the structural resources available in a language as well as analyses of what speakers and writers actually do with those resources. Investigations of a representative text corpus—a principled collection of texts stored on computer—provide important insights into both of these domains and open new avenues of inquiry.

Developing linguistic literacy: perspectives from corpus linguistics and multi-dimensional analysis

In their conceptual framework for linguistic literacy development, Ravid & Tolchinsky synthesize research studies from several perspectives. One of these is corpus-based research, which has been used for several large-scale research studies of spoken and written registers over the past 20 years. In this approach, a large, principled collection of natural texts (a ‘corpus’) is analysed using computational and interactive techniques, to identify the salient linguistic characteristics of each register or text variety. Three characteristics of corpus-based analysis are particularly important (see Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998): [bull ] a special concern for the representativeness of the text sample being analysed, and for the generalizability of findings; [bull ] overt recognition of the interactions among linguistic features: the ways in which features co-occur and alternate; [bull ] a focus on register as the most important parameter of linguistic variation: strong patterns of use in one register often represent only weak patterns in other registers.

The Use of Passives and Impersonal Style in Civil Engineering Writing

Claims abound about passives and the impersonal style they create. Few studies, however, check the claims with a large, systematic analysis of texts from either academia or industry. Motivated by the need to teach effective workplace writing skills to undergraduate engineering students, this study investigates the use of passives and associated impersonal style features in 170 practitioner reports, journal articles, and student reports from civil engineering. Using multidimensional analysis (a technique from corpus linguistics) and interviews of practitioners, students, and faculty, the study found that, as expected, engineering texts, compared to nontechnical texts, have a frequent use of impersonal style features; however, they use passives for a wider range of functions than is typically described in technical writing literature. Furthermore, compared to the journal articles and student reports, the practitioner reports use significantly fewer features of impersonal style. The findings inform teaching materials that present a more realistically complex picture of the language structures and functions important for civil engineering practice.

Register, Genre, and Style: Registers, genres, and styles: fundamental varieties of language

Text varieties in your daily life Before you begin this book, take a minute to think about all the different kinds of texts that you encounter over the course of a normal day. In the morning, maybe you have a conversation with a roommate. As you have breakfast, you might listen to a radio announcer or read the morning newspaper. Then you might make a telephone call to a friend or family member. As you get ready for a class, you might proofread a paper that is due that day or look over the reading you did for homework. When you attend the class, you probably talk with friends, listen to a lecture, and write notes. And thats just the first few hours of your day! For most people, conversation is the most common type of spoken language that they produce. But people typically listen to many different kinds of spoken language: television shows, commercials, radio or television news reports, classroom lectures, political speeches, sermons, and so on. Written language also plays a very important role in daily life for many people. Students usually produce many kinds of writing: notes during class sessions, written assignments, term papers, and possibly numerous text messages and/or e-mail messages. But similar to spoken language, most people read more than they write. In fact, many people read even more different kinds of texts than they listen to: newspaper articles, editorials, novels, e-mail messages, blogs, text messages, letters and ads in the mail, magazine articles, ads in magazines, textbooks, research articles, course syllabi, and other written assignments or handouts.

Register, Genre, and Style: Registers and genres in electronic communication

Introduction: new technology and new registers E-mail. Instant message. Blog. Cell phone. Text message. It is hard to believe that in the early 1980s, these words meant nothing to most people, and even in the early 1990s, many people were only beginning to be aware of them. You may use a computer and cell phone almost every day, but a few decades ago the only people to use computers were computer programmers, and phones were always connected to walls. Then, as the technology became affordable and accessible, communication via electronic means increased tremendously. In 2007, it was estimated that over 1,240,000,000 people were using the internet (www.internetworldstats.com, 2007). Even by 2000 it was estimated that over 800 million people were using e-mail (Crystal 2001). In 2006, over 18 billion text messages per month were sent in the US and 3.5 billion per month in the UK (www.cellsigns.com, 2006; Mobile Data Association, 2007). With this fast growth and wide use, anyone interested in register variation will wonder how language is used in these new registers. In the last chapter, we described historical register change and some case studies where registers evolved gradually over time. In the present chapter, we describe case studies of registers that emerged much more suddenly, becoming established in only a few years following the growth of computers, the internet, and cell-phone technology.