Transcript What’s Not to Like About Contextualized Grammar?

Developing Academic Writing
Fluency Using Corpus-Based
Resources
Colloquium: Designing Academic Writing Tasks Using
Corpus Findings
TESOL, New York, April 4, 2008
Jan Frodesen
University of California, Santa Barbara
[email protected]
What is writing fluency?
Among other things, fluency in academic
writing involves the following abilities:
 Focusing information appropriately through
subordination and embedding
 Creating discourse flow across sentences
through cohesive devices such as the
reference system
 Expressing ideas idiomatically through
collocations common to academic register
How can we help writers
develop fluency?

Consciousness raising and noticing
activities

Recent SLA research advocates developing
explicit knowledge through activities that
draw learners’ attention to how language is
used in texts
How can we help writers
develop fluency?

Guided practice in producing embedded
structures appropriately and accurately


Structures that writers need to use for a variety of
rhetorical tasks and that have been identified as
difficult for them to produce appropriately
Structures used in academic texts that developing
writers tend not to use (or may even avoid) due to
unfamiliarity with how they are used in writing
How can we help writers
develop fluency?

Activities that encourage students to
develop academic grammar and
vocabulary resources for expressing
ideas idiomatically and with some
degree of automaticity
How can we help writers
develop fluency?

Revision tasks that ask writers to apply
what they have learned to work-inprogress and to report on their efforts
Why use corpus-based
resources?
Corpus-based resources can show us:
 How grammatical structures in academic
registers pattern differently from other
registers such as conversation
 How structures within a system are used to
accomplish discourse functions (e.g., how a
variety of reference forms are used for
cohesion at different points in developing a
text)
Why use corpus-based
resources?
They can also tell us:
 How the types of vocabulary that “go
with” (collocate with) grammar
structures in academic registers differ
from vocabulary used with these
structures in other registers such as
journalism, fiction, or conversation
Focus of fluency activities

What follows are noticing and production activities
that illustrate the following:

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Structures identified as fairly common in academic writing
but rare in conversation
Structures in academic writing that co-occur with vocabulary
different from that in other registers
Structures this presenter has identified as ones that student
writers either do not use (avoid) or often use incorrectly
Structures that play important discourse roles in creating
cohesion and coherence in academic text
Embedding Activity 1:
Information in identifying clauses


Purpose: To give writers practice producing
relative (adjective) clauses that identify noun
referents using information about prior events
or circumstances.
Rationale:


This structure is fairly common in academic
writing
The verb tense focused on occurs frequently in
this structure in academic writing but much less so
in other registers
Embedding Activity 1: Relevant (and
sometimes surprising!) corpus findings

Which and that clauses:
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Restrictive (identifying) relative clauses
are very common in academic prose and
occur much more frequently than nonrestrictive relative clauses
Even which clauses are more often
restrictive than non-restrictive.
Embedding Activity 1: Additional
relevant corpus findings

Past perfect verbs


In fiction past perfect verbs are most common in adverbial
clauses:
When everyone had drunk two or three hours,
Nwakibie sent for his wives.
However, in academic registers, the past perfect is most
often used in relative clauses encoding background
information:
The 245-year old was a remnant of the old-growth lodgepole pint that had originally covered the area of all three
stands.
Examples from Biber et al. 1999
Embedding Activity 1: Task 1

Noticing exercise
For each of the following sentences:



Put brackets around the relative clause
Underline the past perfect verbs
Circle the noun that the clause modifies
Activity 1: Task 1 continued
1.
2.
From 1974 to 1975 we studied three
populations of male ground squirrels
[that had emigrated from their
birthplaces near Yosemite National
Park].
Dispersal behavior [that had been
observed previously] indicated that
the sister squirrels acted differently.
Embedding Activity 1: Task 2

Guided practice exercise: Combine the
information in Columns A and B by
writing a sentence that uses an
identifying relative clause with a past
perfect verb.
Activity 1: Task 2 continued

COLUMN A
1. Tensions developed
before the first
primary contest.
2. The research group
finally rejected the
hypothesis.

COLUMN B
1. The tensions
increased with each
subsequent election.
2. Earlier, the
hypothesis appeared
to account for the
skewed results.
Activity 1: Task 2 continued
Examples of combined sentences:
1. The tensions that had developed
before the first primary contest
increased with each subsequent
election.
2. The research group finally rejected the
hypothesis that earlier had appeared to
account for the skewed results.

Embedding Activity 2: Sentence
combining with relativizer whose


Purpose: To raise consciousness about the use of
whose in academic writing to refer to inanimate
nouns, not people; to provide practice embedding
identifying information in whose clauses
Rationale: This is a structure:
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that is not often used in conversation
that developing writers tend not to use or use incorrectly
that patterns differently in academic writing than in other
written registers
Embedding Activity 2: Relevant (and
again surprising!) corpus findings

In newspaper register, whose modifies
human head nouns about 70% of the
time:

He was only eight when Bruce Lee, whose
1973 film Enter the Dragon made him an
international star, died mysteriously.
(Biber et al., 1999)
Activity 2: Relevant corpus
findings, continued

However, in academic writing, whose
modifies inanimate nouns about 75% of the
time:

A crystal is a piece of matter whose boundaries
are naturally formed plane surfaces.
(Biber et al, 1999)
Note how this academic text example is a restrictive
defining clause in contrast to the newspaper
example, which gave additional information.
Activity 2: Getting Whose
concordancing data
Embedding Activity 2: Task 1

Noticing exercise
For each of the following data samples:
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Put brackets [ ] around the whose clause.
Circle the noun or noun phrase that is
modified.
State whether the head noun is (a)
animate or (b) inanimate.
Embedding Activity 2:
Task 1, continued
1. … the graph of f has at least one component [whose
support is the entire interval]
2. …plus a new one called Lingo, a pidgin [whose
vocabulary was derived from the other six]…
3. …he quotes passages of some writers [whose views
seem to corroborate his own], and all those who…
4. …going to the opposite extremes of selecting items
[whose forms are the most unstable]…
5. … now chipped and tarnished, some odd pieces
[whose history no one remembers] …
6. If we have five problems [whose solution we seek in
relatively united fashion]…
Embedding Activity 2: Task 2

Guided practice exercise:
Match the information in Column B with
the terms in Column A. Then combine
sentences, provide definitions and
descriptions using whose clauses.
Embedding Activity 2: Task 2
continued
Column A
1. Locoweed is a plant.
2. Urban renewal is
state-sponsored
destruction.
3. A printed circuit is an
electric circuit.

Column B
a. A conducting metal,
such as copper, is
deposited to form its
conductivity
connections.
b. Cattle who eat its
leaves get severe
poisoning
c. Construction of new
housing is its purpose.
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Embedding Activity 2: Task 2
continued
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Example of combined sentences:
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Locoweed is plant whose leaves can severely
poison cattle who eat them.
A printed circuit is a circuit whose conducting
metal, such as copper, is deposited to form its
conductivity connections.
Urban renewal is state-sponsored destruction
whose purpose is to construct new
neighborhoods.
Other relative clause
structures for fluency work

Findings from corpus analyses also reveal patterns of
usage for common preposition + which structures
such as in which, to which, from which. Student
writers are often not sure how to use them
(sometimes using them where only which is needed),
so noticing and combining practice can be helpful.
See Biber et al, 1999, p. 625 for information about
these forms in academic registers. Concordancers
offer good data showing vocabulary that frequently
occurs with these forms.
Cohesion Activity: Noun
reference
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Purpose: To create awareness of the ways in
which writers use reference chains in
academic writing
Rationale:
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An essential element in creating discourse
cohesion
Developing writers often do not use the full range
of reference forms available or use them
inappropriately
Nominals and cohesive reference: Corpus
findings (from Biber et al., 1999)
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Nominals make up 75% of academic
text! (Compared to 55% of
conversation)
Conversation: Mostly single pronouns
Academic text: Longer, more complex
structures
Reference: More corpus
findings

Anaphoric reference (referring to
previously mentioned NPs)
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Conversation: 95% of anaphoric reference
is personal pronouns
Academic text: Definite article the +
repeated nouns are very common
Reference: Patterns in
academic writing

Although it is by no means an absolute rule,
repeated references to an entity [in academic
prose] tend to follow the same progression of
noun phrase types across texts:

N + postmodifier > premodifier + N > simple
noun > pronoun
(Biber et al. p. 586)
Example of reference
patterning

Deterministic dynamical systems of three or
more dimensions can exhibit behaviors of the
type generated by the rotating taffy machine.
Despite their determinism, the behaviors
generated look extremely random. This is
what it means to say that such systems are
effective mixing devices. The discovery of
chaos suggests that the question of whether
a given random appearing behavior is at base
probabilistic…
Cohesive Reference Activity:
Task 1

Noticing exercise
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Have students work with an assigned reading. Select a key
noun phrase that is referred to at least several times in the
text (or ask them to select the phrases). Have students track
the references and identify the forms: N + postmodifier, N +
premodifier, simple noun, pronoun.
Compare reference forms here with the findings from Biber
et al. Does this text follow the typical patterns? If not, how
does it differ?
Ask students to discuss why the writer chose different forms
at different stages of text development.
Cohesive Reference Activity:
Task 2

Revision Activity

Ask students to look at the ways in which they
have used reference forms to refer to central
topics in their drafts and to consider the following
questions:

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Do you think you have used reference forms
appropriately, moving from more elaborated to reduced
forms of reference? Do your patterns seem similar to the
trends noted in the corpus analyses?
Are there any words or phrases that you think could be
revised to improve flow or make reference more clear?
A final note…

Most activities for developing fluency
involve focused pre-writing (noticing,
guided practice) and revision. The
explicit knowledge that students get
from such fluency activities may take a
long time to become implicit knowledge
that they can use in initial drafting.
References and Resources
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Biber, D., Leech, G. Johansson, S. Conrad, S. &
Finegan, E. (2000) Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Longman
Publications Group
Frodesen, J. (2006). Corpus grammar applications to
sentence combining in the composition
classroom. Applied Linguistics Forum, 27.1.
http://www.tesol.org/Newslettersite/view.asp?nid
=2857
The Compleat Lexical Tutor: www.lextutor.ca/