Developing Academic Writing Fluency Using CorpusBased Resources

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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
• frodesen_at_linguistics.ucsb.edu

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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

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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

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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

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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

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How can we help writers develop fluency?

• Revision tasks that ask writers to apply what
  they have learned to work-in- progress and to
  report on their efforts

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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)

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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

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Focus of fluency activities

• What follows are noticing and production
  activities that illustrate the following
• 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

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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

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Embedding Activity 1 Relevant (and sometimes
surprising!) corpus findings

• Which and that clauses
• Restrictive (identifying) relative clauses
• are very common in academic prose and occur much
  more frequently than non-restrictive relative
  clauses
• Even which clauses are more often restrictive
  than non-restrictive.

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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
  lodge-pole pint that had originally covered the
  area of all three stands.
• Examples from Biber et al. 1999

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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

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Activity 1 Task 1 continued

• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
• 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

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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)

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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.

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Activity 2 Getting Whose concordancing data
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Embedding Activity 2 Task 1

• Noticing exercise
• For each of the following data samples
• 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.

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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

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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.

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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

• Example of combined sentences
• 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.

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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.

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Cohesion Activity Noun reference

• Purpose To create awareness of the ways in which
  writers use reference chains in academic writing
• Rationale
• An essential element in creating discourse
  cohesion
• Developing writers often do not use the full
  range of reference forms available or use them
  inappropriately

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Nominals and cohesive reference Corpus findings
(from Biber et al., 1999)

• Nominals make up 75 of academic text! (Compared
  to 55 of conversation)
• Conversation Mostly single pronouns
• Academic text Longer, more complex structures

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Reference More corpus findings

• Anaphoric reference (referring to previously
  mentioned NPs)
• Conversation 95 of anaphoric reference is
  personal pronouns
• Academic text Definite article the repeated
  nouns are very common

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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 gt premodifier N gt simple noun
  gt pronoun
• (Biber et al. p. 586)

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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

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Cohesive Reference Activity Task 1

• Noticing exercise
• 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.

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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
• 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?

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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.

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References and Resources

• 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/