Transcript Making Meaning through Grammar: 'This Bread I Break' by

What is the evidence for orality in first‐year
composition?
Exploring the question or ‘orality’ empirically
with a controlled data set
Daniel Kies
Department of English
College of DuPage
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The Genesis of the Project
We noted several items related to the question of orality:
Growing concern for a “shift to orality” and consequently a
degeneration, degradation, and overall diminishment of the
English language
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For example consider the next slide.
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Comments in the popular media
Students use texting language in papers at university. Help!
I am not an English teacher, but I just started teaching at an
American college and I have found that several students sometimes
substitute a single number or letter for a word. One student used
"4" instead of "for" throughout his entire paper. Another wrote "U"
instead of "you." It was the kind of writing that you would expect to
see in a text message.These students are still required to take
English no matter what subjects they choose to major in, so it is
hard for me to understand why they make mistakes like these. I
have to assume that it is intentional laziness rather than a real
error, but this makes it harder to correct.
Source: http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/137474Students-use-texting-language-in-papers-at-university-Help
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The Genesis of the Project
We noted a second trend in this line of thought:
The blame is usually attributed to the wide-spread adoption of
communications technology by the millennial generation
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For example, see the next slide
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Comments in the popular media (2)
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Teenagers who frequently use 'techspeak' when they text
performed poorly on a grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former
undergraduate student in communications at Penn State.
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When tweens write in techspeak, they often use shortcuts, such as
homophones, acronyms and omissions of non-essential letters such
as 'wud' for 'would.’
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Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9432222/Texting-isfostering-bad-grammar-and-spelling-researchers-claim.html
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The Genesis of the Project
Finally, we observed:
Parallels between Birkerts’ and Ong’s explorations of linguistic
change triggered by technological innovation seen in the shift
from pre-literate (what Ong called “primary orality”) to
literate cultures reflected in the “secondary orality” (Ong
1982) some researchers believe to exist in the contemporary
technological, cultural, and linguistic environment
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And similar remarks are found in the professional literature
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Fears for the future of writing (1)
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Experts say that children write more these days than they did 20
years ago, because of texting and social media. Most of that writing,
however, is in text-speak, and that form of language becomes a bad
habit. Students are now so used to writing in text-speak that they
can’t easily remember (or apply) proper language rules.
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Communication is becoming more global in scope and more
electronic in form. By the time these children finish school and enter
the workforce, this decline in the spoken (sic) word will become
greater.Written communication, in a formal report, an email, or even
a text, isn’t just happening on the colloquial level anymore, and
children need to be educated on how to use technology in formal,
professional contexts.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/9966117/Text-speaklanguage-evolution-or-just-laziness.html
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Fears for the future of writing (2)
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Rebecca Gemkow, a Lyons Township High School English teacher,
said she believes it is crucial for teenagers to recognize the
difference between social and academic writing in order to be
successful in the real world.
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“I feel that all of the online opportunities and the time spent with
such opportunities puts students at a deficit when it comes to
producing sophisticated writing,” she said. “In result, there is a much
greater responsibility put on teachers to help rectify the situation so
that students will be prepared for the rest of high school, as well as
post-high school writing.”
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Source: http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/4600849-418/teachers-students-seetexting-lingo-popping-up-in-school-writing.html
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The Genesis of the Project
Background of our research corpus (1):
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First-year composition (FYC) corpus, over 7 million words drawn from the
academic writing of the general population of students in first-year writing
classes at a community college in America’s Midwest.
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The corpus spans the period 1989 - 2013, and thus allows for a comparison
of student writing over the time period beginning with the adoption of the
world wide web and search engines by the general population, and the
present, when electronic texts are pervasive.
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The Genesis of the Project
Background of our research corpus (2):
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The FYC corpus is from the same composition courses taught by the same
instructor over the period. This stability produces highly comparable data in
terms of writing topics, and reduces variability that might have been due to
different instructors’ pedagogical styles or abilities.
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The writing prompts were intended to elicit essays in different academic
genres such as summary, review of an article, argumentative/persuasive
essay, descriptive/comparative response, analysis of persuasive writing, and
definition. Major topics were the future of books, The Gutenberg Elegies,
literacy, and in the second semester students typically wrote academic
research essays on topics related to the Orwell’s 1984.
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The Genesis of the Project
Background of our student writers:
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All students have similar backgrounds
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cultural,
linguistic, and
socio-economic
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Most students come from the western suburbs of Chicago
that surround the college
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All students have similar educational achievements
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Research questions
What are the general features of first year composition
students’ writing?
What are the principal markers of orality?
Is there any evidence of a shift to orality in first year
students’ writing over time?
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Methodology (1)
1. Review of previous research on differences between oral and written text.
(e.g. Ong, Halliday & Matthiesson, 2004, O’Donnell, 1974, Chafe, Tannen)
2. Selection of comparable written texts (Orwell’s 1984 and Birkerts’
Gutenberg Elegies essays)
3. Conversion of word files to machine/software readable unicode text files
4. Parsing of 1984 texts using UAMCorpusTool (O’Donnell).
5. Analysis of general linguistic features using UAM and generation of
descriptive stats.
6. General comparison with Biber’s (1988) Mean frequencies for academic
prose and face to face conversation. (Not all categories are easily
comparable).
7. Finer analysis of wordlists using Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott)
8. Concordancing of specific features using WSTools 6.
Future research: More fine-grained analyses. Factor analysis (Biber, 1988,
2006).
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Methodology (2)
Tools:
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WordSmith Tools (Mike Scott)
UAMCorpusTool (Mick O’Donnell)
AntConc (Laurence Anthony)
Materials:
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The pronoun study corpus: 100,000 words on Birkerts’ Gutenberg Elegies.
The verb study corpus: student research essays on George Orwell’s 1984.
 Sub-corpus 1: 1998-99 (449,706 words)
 Sub-corpus 2: 2012-13 (363,157 words)
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Methodology (3)
Techniques:
Establishing sets of metrics from earlier research to
provide a means to measure the orality of the students’
texts:
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Biber et al. (2006) examined a range of university registers, both spoken
and written (T2K-SWAL corpus).
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Includes a wide range of spoken registers such as classroom instruction,
office hours, and service encounters, and written academic registers such
as textbooks and administrative texts, but no student writing.
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The T2K-SWAL corpus provides a useful backdrop against which to
compare student writing, but it does not examine the texts of novice
writers.
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Claims for writing (1)
Writing has been claimed to be:
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More structurally complex and elaborate
More explicit
More decontextualized/autonomous
Less personally involved/ more detached or abstract
Higher concentration of new information
More deliberately organized
(Biber 1988 p. 47).
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Claims for writing (2)
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The theoretical notion of register (field, mode and tenor) from
systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004)
postulates a number of features that distinguish orality i.e.
“very spoken” or conversational English from “very written”
genres such as academic texts. Some markers of orality are:
in terms of field, a tendency to focus on subjective experience;
in tenor, reduction in social distance between interlocuters;
and in mode, lower lexical density, higher grammatical intricacy,
and the predominance of generalized “hypernomic” lexical
items over more abstract or obscure meanings (e.g. went
rather than walk or stagger).
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Claims for writing (3)
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Corpus-based research by Biber, Johannsen, Leech, Conrad, &
Finegan (1999) showed significant differences between
academic and spoken text. For example, 45% of the lexical
verbs in spoken texts were represented by just 12 key words
(words like say, make, think, and get). First and second person
pronouns were much more common in spoken than academic
texts.
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More recent research
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Spoken/written dichotomy is inadequate.
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Biber et al. proposed seven dimensions that cut across
academic discourse.
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Many variations in spoken and written academic registers
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Spoken registers are systematically different from written
registers in vocabulary and lexico-grammatical choices.
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Characteristics of spoken vs written text in
academic contexts
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Biber et al. described 7 dimensions of variation across
registers, but in the university context:
“a fundamental oral/literate opposition” … holds between
spoken and written modes “regardless of purpose,
interactiveness, or other pre-planning considerations.”(Biber,
2006, p. 186).
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Characteristics of spoken vs written text in
academic contexts (2)
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Some key findings of Biber (2006):
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Present tense is the most common tense in academic texts,
both spoken and written. Humanities have the greatest
proportion of past tense at 40%. However, these tend to be in
connection with historical events rather than personal
narratives.
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95% of written and 90% of spoken academic registers use
simple aspect.
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Active voice is much more common than passive (80% in
written academic registers and 90% in spoken.)
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Spoken vs written registers
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Biber et al. (2002) found “strong polarization between
spoken and written registers.”
Written (regardless of purpose) is
 informationally dense, (Dimension 1),
 non-narrative focus (Dimension 2),
 elaborated reference (Dimension 3),
 little overt persuasion (Dimension 4), and
 impersonal (Dimension 5).
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University registers
(Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd, and Helt, 2002)
Written (e.g. textbooks, syllabi,
administrative info.)
Spoken (e.g. lectures, labs. study
groups, office hrs)
Information-dense
Involvement and interaction
(D1)
Non-narrative focus (D2)
Non-narrative focus (D2)
Elaborated reference (D3)
Situated reference
Little overt persuasion (D4)
More overt persuasion
Impersonal style
Less impersonal in style
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(D5)
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Oral and literate discourse compared on
Dimension 1:
Positive features for orality:
“interactiveness and personal involvement (1st and 2nd person
pronouns, WH questions), personal stance (e.g., mental verbs, thatclauses with likelihood verbs and factual verbs, factual adverbials,
hedges), and structural reduction and formulaic language (e.g.,
contractions, that- omission, common vocabulary, lexical bundles)”
(p. 186.)
These features contrast with literate discourse:
“informational density and complex noun phrase structures
(frequent nouns and nominalizations, prepositional phrases,
adjectives, and relative causes) as well as passive constructions” (p.
186.)
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Oral and literate discourse compared on
Dimension (2):

Markers of orality in lexical verb choice in a corpus of student academic writing.
The third speaker examines changes in the use of lexical verbs over time. Although the verb
(or verb phrase) is central to the meaning and structure of the clause (Halliday & Matthiessen,
2004) there has been little previous corpus-based research on the effect of verb choices on
the academic writing style of native, or near-native speaker, students (But see Partridge, 2011
on L1 and L2 writers). In the current research, sub-sets of the FYC corpus from key time
periods were analyzed using Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott, 2012) for markers of orality in the
verb phrase. The findings were compared against the academic and spoken genre sub-corpora
of the Corpus of Contemporary American English COCA (100 million running words). The
preliminary findings are that in this sample of college writing, after the 12 most common
lexical verbs in the language, the next 20 most frequent verbs students used were from the
spoken corpus rather than the academic corpus. The most frequent verb in the next 20 most
frequent from the academic list is use. This is also consistent in the student data. Students rely
on general purpose verbs like believe and understand that are also among the most frequent in
conversation, rather than the most common verbs from the COCA academic list (e.g. provide,
include, consider, determine). There is less lexical variety in verb choices, and more focus on
general “troponymic” verbs (Fellbaum & Miller, 1990) than in the COCA academic corpus.
Verb choices and frequencies in this sample of student writing overall share more in common
with the spoken texts than the academic ones in COCA. However, there is no strong
evidence of a shift towards greater orality in lexical verb choice over the period under
investigation; if anything, the students of the 21st century appear to be making slightly more
“academic” choices than their predecessors.
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Results
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Our data+ most closely approximates humanites. But first
yr. comp is not so discipline specific.
Students still under influence of school genres.
Influence of classroom genres like the lecture and
textbook.
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Comparison of linguistic features
Feature
1998-9 research papers
2012-13 research papers
449,706 words
363,157 words
% of total and Frequency/1,000 words
% of total and Frequency/1,000 words
Noun
32.72% (327)
32.60% (326)
Verb
16.23% (162)
16.53% (165)
Adjective
0.37% (4)
0.37% (4)
Pronoun
4.75% (47)
4.52% (45)
Adverb
3.99% (40)
4.06% (41)
Preposition
10.71% (107)
Conjunction 3.19% (32)
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11.09% (111)
3.29% (33)
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Comparison of linguistic features
Feature
Biber 1998
Biber 1998
Academic prose
Face-to-face conversation
FYC 1998-99 (2012-13)
Frequency/1,000 words
Noun
188
137.4
267 (265)
Adjective attrib.
76.9
40.8
3.7(4) (Comp. and super)
Preposition
139.5
85.0
107 (111)
Conjunction
3.0
0.3
32 (33)
Verb (past)
21.9
37.4
27.5 (25)
Verb (pres)
63.7
128.4
49.1 (49.7)
Pronoun (pers.)
5.8
39.3
(45)
Adverb
51.8
86.0
40 (41)
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Comparison of linguistic features
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Grammatical verbs: be, have, do, modals.
Lexical verbs:
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Difficulty of separating lexical verbs from nouns that look the same. eg. command and command.
Find all verbs
Past tense
Present tense
Passive
Passive without agent
Present participle
Past participle
Most common verbs in both speech and writing
Most common verbs in COCA spoken corpus
Most common verbs in COCA ac corpus (look for humanities subset).
Latin-based verbs.
Phrasal verbs substituting for Latin-based or single word verbs.
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Results: Interjections

corpus.byu.edu (Academic prose [journal articles])
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SECTION
2005-2009
# TOKENS
6031
SIZE
102,046,528
PER MILLION
59.10
Results: Interjections
Orwell research papers 1998-99
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Length:
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Text Complexity:
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- Number of segments:109
- Words in segments:128
- Av. Word Length:4.04
- Av. Segment Length:1.17
Lexical Density:
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- Lexemes per segment:0.72
- Lexemes % of text:61.72%
Results: Interjections
Orwell research papers 2012-13
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Length:
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Text Complexity:
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- Number of segments:60
- Words in segments:56
- Av. Word Length:3.93
- Av. Segment Length:0.93
Lexical Density:
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- Lexemes per segment:0.67
- Lexemes % of text:71.43%
Results
Orwell research papers 1998-99 and 2012-13 versus
Academic prose (corpus.byu.edu)
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Contractions:
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Voice:
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-
Nominalization:
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-
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Prepositional phrases:
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-
Conclusions (1)
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Uses of texting and emoji
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ur = ‘your’
YMMV = ‘Your mileage may vary’
eat ur own dogfood = ‘Use your own device or software’ or
‘Follow your own advice’
;-) = ‘wink’ = ‘Just kidding’ or ‘Just flirting’
No examples from student data (except for one paper in
which a student compares texting to Newspeak)
Conclusions (2)
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Uses of texting and emoji = the return of the Rebus principle
Conclusions (3)
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The return of the Rebus principle = a commonly used
communication system, which we use everyday whenever we use a
technology mediated communication (smart phones and browsers)
References
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge
University Pres.
Biber, D., Johannsen, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Biber, D. (2006) University Language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers.
John Benjamins.
Fellbaum, C., & Miller, G. A. (1990). Folk psychology or semantic entailment? Comment
on Rips and Conrad (1989). Psychological Review, 0033295X, 97(4), 565-570.
Freeman Y.S. & Freeman, D. (2009) Academic Language for English language learners and
struggling readers. How to help students succeed across content areas. Portsmouth NH:
Heinemann.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3 ed.).
London: Arnold.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy:The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge.
Partridge, M. (2011). A comparison of lexical specificity in the communication verbs of
L1 English and TE student writing. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language
Studies, 29(2), 135-147.
Scott, M. (2012). Wordsmith Tools version 6. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
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Contact Information
Daniel Kies
Department of English
College of DuPage
425 Fawell Boulevard
Glen Ellyn, Illinois 60137, USA
[email protected]
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