A Quantitative Corpus-based Analysis of Linking Adverbials in Students’ Academic Writing

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Effects of corpus-based instruction on phraseology in learner English

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks.Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus.The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size

SFDRS as a metalanguage for ‘foodscaping’: adding a formal dimension to an interdisciplinary, multimodal approach to food

‘Foodscaping’ seeks to understand how meaning is made through humans’ interaction with food in particular environments through a multimodal and interdisciplinary analytical lens. As part of a foodscaping project, researchers often interpret food environments to which they are not intimately ‘local’. This presents cross-cultural limitations in the production of analysis. Most pertinently, how can personal interpretation be divorced from locally salient and meaningful discourses? This paper presents the findings of a pilot foodscaping analysis using the box notation style of Kim’s Korean Segmented Film Discourse Representation Structures (K-SFDRS). K-SFDRS notation, developed to provide both coarser- and finer-grained formal transcription for South Korean multimodal film discourse analysis, is tested as an analytic tool for an authentic South Korean foodscaping experience. This paper aims to ascertain whether the formal nature of K-SFDRS transcription is a useful aid to the analysis of a foodscape, which otherwise risks relying heavily on personal interpretation. This pilot study presents an introduction to both foodscaping and (K-)SFDRS, outlines the potentials of (K-)SFDRS notation within a foodscaping context, offers a step-by-step outline for constructing K-SFDRS box notation using an exemplar South Korean foodscape, and finally demonstrates how this box notation may be used in the support of foodscaping analysis in various interdisciplinary channels. During this pilot study, the authors make a novel methodological development in the form of what they term ‘cluster structures’, which overcome the problems presented by the lack of cinematic narrative editing in spontaneous discourse, segmenting meaning into logical forms within which structures of meaning are hierarchised without requiring the discourse relations to structure the logical forms themselves in narrative discourse following the original K-SFDRS methodology. The paper concludes that K-SFDRS, alongside the aforementioned methodological development, has potential to help foodscaping researchers constrain interpretation to salient discourses and direct foodscaping analysis down meaningful avenues. Through its culinary scope, this chapter adds a new disciplinary dimension to discussions of metalanguage and makes an innovative contribution to the current corpus of multimodal research