scholarly journals Preposition Pied Piping and Stranding in Academic and Popular Nigerian English Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Roseline Abonego Adejare
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Systemic Theory ◽  
Popular Writing ◽  
Relevant Component

This paper examined preposition pied piping and stranding in academic and popular Nigerian English writing with a view to determining their pattern of occurrence. Preposition placement has not been studied in Nigerian English and in specific genres. The 160 246-word relevant component of ICE-Nigeria was the sub-corpus used, and the Systemic Theory guided the study. Analysed using a multi-layered qualitative approach, the data comprised 112 cases of pied piping, 64 of stranding and 4 of doubling. Pied piping was dominant over stranding in Academic Writing (78 percent v 22 percent), and stranding was 1.7 times more frequent in Popular Writing than in Academic Writing. Though evenly distributed in Popular Writing (44 each), pied piping was about twice as frequent as stranding in Popular Natural Sciences while stranding was virtually non-existent in Academic Natural Sciences. Whereas to-infinitive and passive clauses were stranding favourite sites (21 and 15 respectively), only in wh-relative clauses did pied piping operate and in which was the prominent sequence. In Academic Writing prepositions were pied-piped and stranded at an average of 3.83 and 1.82 per form respectively, but the rates were 3.31 and 3.1 in Popular Writing. Whereas in was the most pied-piped preposition and was 5.2 times more likely to be pied-piped than stranded, up was the most stranded form and its stranding relative to pied piping was infinitely more. Subtle differences in the genres’ degree of formality explain the disparities in the distribution of pied piping and stranding in the sub-corpus analysed.

Elaboration, compression and explicitness across sub-registers of popular and academic writing in Hong Kong English

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Elena Seoane ◽  
Cristina Suárez-Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Register Variation ◽  
Popular Writing ◽  
Hong Kong English ◽  
Opposite Tendency

Abstract In this study we examine elaboration, compression and explicitness in academic and popular writing in an Outer Circle variety of English, that of Hong-Kong, as represented in the International Corpus of English corpus. As Biber and Gray (2016) show, contemporary academic discourse is structurally compressed at NP level (rather than elaborated) and inexplicit in the expression of meaning. The linguistic features selected for analysis are short passives, which are compressed and inexplicit, and adnominal relative clauses, which represent the opposite tendency, that towards elaboration and explicitness. We focus on register variation through analyzing, first, differences between academic and popular writing, and second, interdisciplinary variation in four sub-registers: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology.

Instruction of Nominalization by Applying Enabling of POA

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-358
Author(s):  
Hao Chen
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Academic English ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Learning Journals ◽  
English Majors ◽  
Chinese English Learners ◽  
Oriented Approach

AbstractIt is noticeable that the academic papers written by Chinese English learners are lacking in academic features largely due to their poor ability to use nominalization. Therefore, the instruction of nominalization in an academic English writing course is badly needed. The author conducted one-semester-long instruction of nominalization to 90 non-English majors under the guidance of the production-oriented approach (POA). This research demonstrated how to apply POA, specifically, the enabling procedure to the teaching of nominalization. By triangulating the data of students’ interviews, learning journals and written output, and the data of 4 teachers’ class observations and interviews, this study found that the accurate application of the three criteria of effective enabling contributed to the improvement of the quantity and quality of nominalization in academic writing.

scholarly journals A Study of University Students in Japan: Learning and Application of Academic English Writing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
James Graham McKinley
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Writing Classes ◽  
Writer Identity ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The Rich

<p>This study investigated Japanese first and second year undergraduate students learning English academic writing in their compulsory English composition courses in a Japanese university. The thesis takes a social constructivist approach to investigate the aspects of critical argument and writer identity in these students’ classes and their writing.  The data for the study include classroom observations and teacher and student interviews, all conducted monthly throughout the academic year-long course. In total there were six courses, four teachers, and sixteen student participants. The observations were analyzed using an adapted version of Ivanič’s (2004) Discourses of Writing framework, which focused on aspects of identity construction in the writing classroom. The linguistic data included a selection of one major piece of writing from each student, analyzed using an adapted Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 1997; 2000). In order to maintain a focus on writer identity in the analysis, Clark and Ivanič’s (1997) selves were identified through this analysis. In addition, the texts were analyzed for use of Casanave’s (2002) writing game strategies, in order to further establish the students’ approaches in writing their texts. The objective was not to generalize about how Japanese students learn to write academic English, but rather to provide, from a social constructivist, Western researcher’s perspective, an analysis of what happened in these students’ writing classes and how it affected their writing for those classes.  Teachers’ general practices in the observed courses mainly focused on two aspects of writing: 1) as a communicative act (writing for a reader), and 2) as an exercise in critical thinking (developing a thesis). These two aspects emerged from the observation and interview data collection. The four teachers used very different approaches in designing their courses, and the students in the same classes responded in different ways, mostly depending on their ability to understand their teachers’ intentions and to form appropriate academic identities in an attempt to meet their teachers’ expectations. The analysis of the students’ written texts revealed that students often did not meet the teachers’ expectations of writing objectively and using a genre-appropriate voice as students often resorted to the same authorial voice to push their thesis.  This investigation was designed to inform pedagogic practices for university teachers of academic English and curriculum designers in Japan to establish effective English writing courses. The rich description of classroom practices and resulting written texts and the focus on differences in cultural expectations between teachers and students provide significant contributions to this area of inquiry. The main pedagogical suggestions are standardizing course objectives and goals, assigning more reading as a part of writing, and teaching students how to write authoritatively.</p>

Automatically Augmenting Academic Text for Language Learning

2018 ◽  
pp. 512-537
Author(s):  
Shaoqun Wu ◽  
Alannah Fitzgerald ◽  
Ian H. Witten ◽  
Alex Yu
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
British Library ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Lexical Bundles ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Design Considerations

This chapter describes the automated FLAX language system (flax.nzdl.org) that extracts salient linguistic features from academic text and presents them in an interface designed for L2 students who are learning academic writing. Typical lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase, collocations, and lexical bundles are automatically identified and extracted in a corpus; learners can explore them by searching and browsing, and inspect them along with contextual information. This chapter uses a single running example, the PhD abstracts corpus of 9.8 million words derived from the open access Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) at the British Library, but the approach is fully automated and can be applied to any collection of English writing. Implications for reusing open access publications for non-commercial educational and research purposes are presented for discussion. Design considerations for developing teaching and learning applications that focus on the rhetorical and lexico-grammatical patterns found in the abstract genre are also discussed.

Teacher Self-Assessment of Feedback Practices in an EFL Academic Writing Class - A Reflective Case Study

2017 ◽  
pp. 162-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddy White
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Teacher Feedback ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Teacher Commentary ◽  
Feedback Interventions ◽  
Giving Feedback

Unlike studies of teacher feedback on student writing, research into teacher self-assessment of their own feedback practices is quite rare in the assessment literature. In this reflective case study, the researcher/teacher systematically analyzed feedback practices to clearly determine the form and kind of formative feedback being provided on student essays, and also to compare these feedback practices to recommended practice from the feedback literature. The research took place in an academic English writing course for third-year students at a Japanese university. A close examination of the teacher feedback on the first draft of 21 student essays was undertaken, and more than 800 feedback interventions were identified and coded. Results of this investigation show a number of patterns of practice in giving feedback, including; extensive use of questions in teacher commentary, very limited use of praise comments, and varying amounts of feedback provided on individual essays. Results also show that the feedback practices discovered through this investigation align well with recommended best practice. The case study positions the teacher as ‘learner' in this feedback process, and calls for similar published research describing in detail what teachers do when providing feedback to students on their work.

The use of general and specialized corpora as reference sources for academic English writing: A case study

ReCALL ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji-Yeon Chang
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
English For Academic Purposes ◽  
Discourse Community ◽  
Academic Experience ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Training Corpus ◽  
English Writing ◽  
English Speaking

AbstractCorpora have been suggested as valuable sources for teaching English for academic purposes (EAP). Since previous studies have mainly focused on corpus use in classroom settings, more research is needed to reveal how students react to using corpora on their own and what should be provided to help them become autonomous corpus users, considering that their ultimate goal is to be independent scholars and writers. In the present study, conducted in an engineering lab at a Korean university over 22 weeks, data on students’ experiences and evaluations of consulting general and specialized corpora for academic writing were collected and analyzed. The findings show that, while both corpora served the participants well as reference sources, the specialized corpus was particularly valued for its direct help in academic writing because, as non-native English-speaking graduate engineering students, the participants wanted to follow the writing conventions of their discourse community. The participants also showed disparate attitudes toward the time taken for corpus consultation due to differences in factors such as academic experience, search purposes, and writing tasks. The article concludes with several suggestions for better corpus use with EAP students regarding the compilation of a corpus, corpus training, corpus competence, and academic writing.

scholarly journals Mitigating Suburban English Writing Teachers’ Constrained Professional Development Through Distance Education: One Case Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Distance Education ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Multiple Constraints ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Writing Teachers ◽  
English Writing ◽  
English Literacy ◽  
Support Students

This study reports on how a Chinese suburban English writing teacher responded to systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based distance education. The study draws on qualitative content analyses of the teacher’s reflections, interviews, and classroom interactions. The results show that through SFL-based distance education, the teacher, interacting with his agency, overcame multiple constraints and developed academically in terms of how to understand valued academic writing. Additionally, the teacher also harnessed this newfound knowledge to support students’ socialization into academic English discourse. The study concludes the effectiveness of SFL-based distance education for English writing teachers in similarly constrained contexts, which could be enhanced by teachers’ agency. Implications of the study include synergizing the SFL-based curriculum with distance teacher education so that language educators can better assist students in gaining the knowledge needed for navigating academic English literacy.

College students’ awareness in organizational strategy use in English writing

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-209
Author(s):  
Shih-Chieh Chien
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Organizational Strategy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Final Comment ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
High Achieving

Purpose – The purpose of the study is to look at Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ organizational strategy use in English writing at universities in Taiwan. One significant area that has been indicated in contrastive rhetoric studies spins around the notion of culturally constructed organizational patterns. It is claimed that second language (L2) writers may have implicit culturally driven presuppositions and values about academic writing in the first language (L1) that may transfer straightforwardly to academic writing in English. Design/methodology/approach – Data were from 50 high- and 50 low-achieving EFL students’ and 50 native English speakers’ (NESs’) written texts, and semi-structured interviews with EFL students and their teachers. Findings – Based on text analysis, when high-achieving EFL students and NESs were compared, they were similar in location of thesis, existence of introduction, existence of topic sentences, macro-level patterns, existence of conclusion, existence of a concluding sentence and existence of a final comment, but different in existence of background information. Nonetheless, it is noted that low-achieving EFL students were quite different from high-achieving EFL students and NESs in several aspects, such as location of thesis, existence of introduction, existence of topic sentences, macro-level patterns, existence of conclusion, existence of a concluding sentence, and existence of a final comment. In addition, the written texts and interview findings suggest that while cultural differences do, in fact, exist, Chinese writers’ English organizational strategy use were to some extent intertwined with their writing experiences and teachers’ writing instructions. The results also suggest the flexibility of writers and multiplicity of writing experiences within a cultural group. Originality/value – The study makes original recommendations for language pedagogy.

scholarly journals MACRO COHERENCE LEVEL ON STUDENTS’ SCIENTIFIC PAPER

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
Leora Grahadila Andovita ◽  
Aceng Rahmat ◽  
Hanif Pujiati
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Education ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Scientific Paper ◽  
Research Proposal ◽  
Written Text ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Proposal Writing ◽  
Proposal A ◽  
Coherence Level

Purposely contemplating at seventh semester students of English Education Study Progam, it is perceived that students exhibit a lack of skills in use of rhetoric, predominantly making errors in the use of words and phrases, directly translating words from Bahasa Indonesia to English – interlanguage error – and organizing their written text inadequately. Moreover, it is discovered that the viewpoints of the students frequently shift. To address this, this current study aims at investigating students’ macro-level coherence in their academic writing (henceforth; background of the study of a research proposal). A content analysis is applied including documents. Additionally, a descriptive analysis design is used to guide this study. There are six research proposals investigated to gain the data of this study. These proposals are taken purposively sampled from proposals submission from early 2018 intake. There are two main frameworks in this study. Firstly, the academic writing guidance book is used to analyze the rhetoric/organization of the paper. Secondly, the coherence analysis is applied to evaluate students’ coherence level. Analysis of findings shows that students encounter some problems in the coherence of English research proposal writing. Hence, it is argued that close attention should be paid to the refinement and suitable tutoring of coherence in the teaching of academic English writing

scholarly journals Energizing Students’ Academic Writing Competence through Research Group Activity (A Supervisor Intervention)

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 589
Author(s):  
Lastika Ary Prihandoko
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Research Group ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Group Activity ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Writing Competence ◽  
Selection Of

The outcome of having a manuscript published in reputable international journals leads students to various challenges. The supervisor has an essential role in succeeding students to achieve this goal. This study aims to determine the position of the supervisor in guiding students to have a publication in reputable international journals by a research group activity. This study focuses on retrieving data from three non-native speakers (NNS) supervisors who guide graduate students majoring in chemistry who have manuscripts published in reputable international journals. Data obtained by interview method. This research uses the qualitative approach with descriptive analysis. Based on the data collected, the mentor has a crucial role in succeeding the students to have reputable international manuscript publications. Interventions conducted by supervisor varied from the selection of a title to the choice of journal publisher.

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