Polysemous English phrasal verbs: EFL textbook distribution, students' receptive and productive knowledge and teachers' beliefs in the Greek Cypriot context

Formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations and phrasal verbs constitute an essential part of English vocabulary and a crucial element of foreign language learners’ communicative competence. While substantial research has been carried out on idioms and collocations comparatively fewer studies have focused on phrasal verbs despite the great difficulty, they possess to foreign language learners and although phrasal verbs are considered necessary for native-like fluency. This thesis aims to fill in this gap by exploring, i) phrasal verb distribution in English foreign language textbooks, ii) English language learners’ knowledge of phrasal verbs and iii) English foreign language teachers’ beliefs about phrasal verb learning and teaching. This first study examined the occurrence and recurrence of phrasal verbs in six English foreign language textbooks in order to shed some light in what seems to be an under-researched area. Research has shown that phrasal verbs are polysemous and can have more than one meaning sense. Gardner and Davies (2007) estimated that each of the 100 most frequently used phrasal verbs in the British National Corpus has on average 5.6 meaning senses, while, Garnier and Schmitt (2015) concluded that each of the 150 most frequently used phrasal verbs in the Corpus of Contemporary American English has on average two meaning senses. Nonetheless, no research, so far, explored the way the various phrasal verb meaning senses are treated in contemporary English foreign language textbooks. To fill in this gap, the first study, explored the distribution of phrasal verbs and their frequently used meaning senses (based on native speakers’ corpus indications) in the textbooks. The results of this study highlight the need for textbook writers to i) adopt a more scientific based and systematic selection process, taking into consideration the polysemous nature of phrasal verbs and ii) provide more opportunities for repetition, an essential component of vocabulary acquisition. The second study explored 100 English foreign language learners’ productive and receptive knowledge of a sample of high frequency phrasal verbs and phrasal verb meaning senses. Participants were tested at form-recall and form-recognition level of mastery and the effect of frequency (based on textbooks and corpus indications) and a number of language engagement factors on knowledge were examined. Twenty participants also took part in an interview to validate the form-recall test items. Results showed that participants had a rather weak knowledge of phrasal verbs. Consistent with previous findings the robust effect of frequency and engagement in leisure activities, such as reading and watching English films, was further supported. The third study investigated English foreign language teachers’ beliefs about phrasal verb teaching and learning. Following a qualitative approach, twenty teachers took part in semi-structured interviews in order to gain insights into their beliefs about phrasal verbs. Analysis of the results indicated that all teachers considered phrasal verbs to be one of the most challenging feature of English vocabulary. Nonetheless, conflicting results about phrasal verb importance were found, as non-native speaker teachers seemed to consider phrasal verbs a less important element of English vocabulary, while all native-speaker teachers stressed the importance of learning phrasal verbs. This study concluded that teachers’ beliefs about phrasal verbs were differentially affected by the numbers of teaching experience, L1 background and students’ proficiency level. Overall, the results of these studies stress the lack of foreign language learners’ phrasal verb knowledge and highlight the need for better treatment of this word combination in foreign language teaching contexts. My research results may prove useful, to second language researchers, textbook writers, and material designers as well as to foreign language teachers. It is hoped that polysemous phrasal verbs will receive more attention in the field of Applied Linguistics and future efforts will try to improve the quality of textbooks and provide foreign language teachers with the necessary support for phrasal verb teaching

A corpus-driven study of features of Chinese students' undergraduate writing in UK universities

Chinese people now comprise the ‘largest single overseas student group in the UK’ with more than 85,000 Chinese students registered at UK institutions in 2009 (British Council, 2010a). While there have been many studies carried out on short argumentative essays from this group (e.g. Chen, 2009), and on postgraduate theses (e.g. Hyland, 2008b), there has been comparatively little research conducted on the high-stakes genre of undergraduate assignments. This study examines assessed writing from Chinese and British undergraduates studying in UK universities between 2000 and 2008; these are investigated using corpus linguistic procedures, supported by qualitative reading. A particular focus is the use of lexical chunks, or recurring strings of words. Findings from the literature on Chinese students’ written English indicate high use of informal chunks, connecting chunks, and those containing first person pronouns (e.g. Milton, 1999). This study found that while the Chinese students make greater use of particular connectors and the first person plural, both student groups make (limited) use of informal language. These areas of difference are more apparent in year 1/2 assignments than those from year 3, suggesting that students gradually conform to the academy’s expectations. Unexpected findings which have not been previously identified in the literature include Chinese students’ significantly higher use of tables, figures (or ‘visuals’) and lists, compared to the British students’ writing. Detailed exploration of writing within Biology, Economics and Engineering suggests that using visuals and lists are different, yet equally acceptable, ways of writing assignments. Since the writing of both student groups has been judged by discipline specialists to be of a high standard, it is argued that the difference in use of visuals and lists illustrates the range of acceptability at undergraduate level. The thesis proposes that scholars therefore need to consider expanding the notion of what constitutes ‘good’ student writing

Lexical bundles in Wikipedia articles and related texts : Exploring disciplinary variation

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Malaysian learners’ argumentative writing in English: A contrastive, corpus-driven study

Research on learner English is by now an established sub-discipline in corpus linguistics, yet few studies exist on Malaysian learners. This thesis explores the difficulties that Malaysian learners of English face when producing argumentative essays, focussing on their overuse of particular linguistic features. WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012) is used to analyse and compare two corpora: The Malaysian Corpus of Students’ Argumentative Writing (MCSAW): Version 2, consisting of 1,460 Malaysian students’ argumentative essays; and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), which is a corpus of native English essays written by British and American students and is used as a reference language variety here. The software enables analysis of keywords (words that are over-used in MCSCAW), collocates or surrounding words of the keywords, and concordances, which are used to examine the keywords in context. Crucially, it also allows examination of the ‘range’ of linguistic features (i.e. by how many students a feature is employed) – an under-used but crucial affordance of this software programme that is exploited in this thesis for down-sampling purposes. The thesis combines quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic techniques, with keywords providing the starting point for in-depth qualitative analysis using concordancing. This corpus-driven analysis of MCSAW identifies typical features of the writing style of Malaysian learners’ writing of English, particularly the overuse of can and we (including the highly frequent bundle we can), and the lack of discourse-organising markers. Analysis of key words and key bundles is complemented with collocation analysis and concordancing of the highly frequent modal verb can as well as the highly frequent first person plural pronoun we, which both have a high range across the corpus. The concordances are carefully and systematically examined to explore the ways in which these over-used linguistic items are actually employed in their co-text by the Malaysian writers. While results show some similarities in both learner corpus and reference language variety, Malaysian learners tend to demonstrate higher writer visibility overall. One possible explanation lies in the influence of the national language (Malay). The thesis also identifies repeated sentences that occur in more than one essay, which implies either plagiarism on the learners’ part or a particular teaching strategy (templates or phrases that are provided to students). This finding has significant implications for corpus design (in terms of the need for more topic variation) as well as methodological significance (in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of using the ‘range’ feature for down-sampling), which are also discussed in this thesis. In sum, this thesis makes a new contribution to corpus linguistic research on learner English and will have implications for the development of teaching practices for Malaysian learners of English

Writing in the university: education, knowledge and reputation

This paper challenges the widespread view that writing is somehow peripheral to the more serious aspects of university life – doing research and teaching students. It argues that universities are about writing and that specialist forms of academic literacy are at the heart of everything we do: central to constructing knowledge, educating students and negotiating a professional academic career. Seeing literacy as embedded in the beliefs and practices of individual disciplines, instead of a generic skill that students have failed to develop at school, helps explain the difficulties both students and academics have in controlling the conventions of disciplinary discourses. Ultimately, and in an important sense, we are what we write, and we need to understand the distinctive ways our disciplines have of addressing colleagues and presenting arguments, as it is through language that academics and students conceptualise their subjects and argue their claims persuasively.published_or_final_versio

The Correlation Between Teaching Collocations and Lexical Bundles and the Improvement in the Writing Skill of First-Year University Students

This study explores the correlation between the teaching of collocations and lexical bundles and the improvement of the writing skill of first-year university students. The thesis addresses three research questions. First, to what extent can the explicit teaching of collocations and lexical bundles assist the students in learning them and can later use the acquired collocations and lexical bundles morphologically and grammatically accurately in writing? Second, the study asks if there is a correlation between using the collocation and lexical bundle and improving the writing grade. Finally, the study investigated if there is a relationship between the increase in the number of collocations and lexical bundles and the difference in the writing grade and whether such an increase leads to improvement in the overall score. It is worth mentioning that the collocations and lexical bundles are two of the leading representatives of the Formulaic language. Many studies discussed the significant role that collocations and the lexical bundles play in helping English as a foreign language students (EFLs) to express themselves accurately in writing, besides providing them with the knowledge to produce coherent and precise text. The study implemented quantitative research, and the findings were the outcome of the statistical analysis of the pre-test and post-tests and written assignments of the control and experimental groups. The findings concluded that the explicit instruction of the collocation and lexical bundles significantly improved the overall writing grade of the experimental group. The study identified some commonly used collocations and lexical bundles among the high-achieving participants, and the number of the collocations and lexical bundles used in writing positively correlated with an improved overall grade. More suggestions will be discussed on how more attention should be given to incorporating the collocation and lexical bundles in the English for Academic Purposes programmes in universities

Mathematical modelling in upper secondary school : A case study of Norwegian curriculum discourses

Innanfor matematikkdidaktisk forsking har matematisk modellering utvikla seg som forskingsfelt, der forskarar frå alle verdsdelar er aktive. Ulike perspektiv på matematisk modellering har vakse fram, og det er identifisert eit gap mellom korleis matematisk modellering er framstilt i forsking og undervisingsdebattar på den eine sida, og korleis matematisk modellering blir arbeida med i klasseromma på den andre sida. I Noreg har matematisk modellering vore ein del av læreplanen i matematikk for vidaregåande skule dei siste 30 åra. I denne avhandlinga, ein case-studie av Praktisk matematikk 2P i den norske vidaregåande skulen, blir dette forskingsspørsmålet svara på: Kva perspektiv på matematisk modellering kan identifiserast i ulike diskursar av læreplanen, og kva for diskursive og sosiale praksisar kan identifiserast i og mellom diskursane? Desse diskursane er inkluderte i studien: Den ideologiske (forskingslitteratur og rammeverk), intenderte (dei norske læreplanane R94, L97, LK06 og LK20), instruktive (lærebokoppgåver), oppfatta (lærarintervju), utøvde (klasseromsobservasjonar) og vurderte (eksamensoppgåver) læreplanen. Som teoretisk rammeverk har eg tatt utgangspunkt i case study theory, framework for curriculum assessment, discourse analysis og positioning theory. I tillegg er ein modelleringssyklus sentral i analysane av matematikkoppgåvene, og ein teori om ulike modelleringsperspektiv er inkludert i metaanalysen. I denne avhandlinga er det utvikla nye tilnærmingsmåtar innanfor matematikkdidaktisk forsking: Å nytte positioning theory til å analysere undervising av matematisk modellering, og gjennomgripande læreplanvurdering av matematisk modellering ved hjelp av diskursteori. I studien har dei ulike læreplandiskursane blitt sett i samanheng, og det er trekt fram korleis dei påverkar kvarandre, og korleis sosiale og diskursive strukturar kan føre til at visse forståingar av matematisk modellering utviklar seg. I den ideologiske og den intenderte læreplanen har eg identifisert eit mangfald av modelleringsperspektiv som krev at elevane sjølv må ta avgjersler, analysere og utvikle matematiske modellar, og nytte desse til å løyse problem utanfor skulematematikken. Eg har ikkje funne særleg spor av konsumering av desse læreplandiskursane i dei andre. I den instruktive læreplanen kan lærebokoppgåvene bli løyste ved å hugse og å bruke framgangsmåtar. Tidlegare gitte eksamensoppgåver er inkluderte i lærebøkene. I den oppfatta læreplanen uttrykte lærarar at dei ikkje kjente til matematisk modellering frå eiga utdanning innanfor undervising av matematikk, og såg ikkje på matematisk modellering som viktig for at elevane skal meistre kvardagssituasjonar. I den utøvde læreplanen blei matematisk modellering knytt til eitt matematisk kunnskapsområde, og lærarane viste til læreboka og eksamen for å argumentere for vala knytt til undervising av matematisk modellering. Med andre ord blei den vurderte læreplanen konsumert i produksjonen av den instruktive, oppfatta og utøvde læreplanen. Sidan praksisane i den vurderte læreplanen, ein 5-timers skriftleg eksamen, ikkje legg til rette for å løyse holistiske modelleringsoppgåver, kan dette føre til at visse forståingar av matematisk modellering oppstår. Sjølv om lærarar vedkjente at opne modelleringsoppgåver hjelper elevane til å sjå matematikk som relevant for livet utanfor skulen, opplevde dei ikkje at læreplandiskursane tillet eller la til rette for arbeid med slike oppgåver. I slutten av denne avhandlinga kjem eg med nokre forslag til korleis ein kan minske gapet mellom forskings- og utdanningsdebatten og korleis matematisk modellering kjem til uttrykk i klasserommet, ved å peike på maktrelasjonar som er avdekka i denne studien.The research field of mathematical modelling within mathematics education has maturated, with the participation of researchers from all parts of the world. Different perspectives on mathematical modelling have emerged, and a gap has been identified between official regulations and the educational debate, on one hand, and the everyday teaching practice of mathematical modelling, on the other hand. In Norway, mathematical modelling has been an explicit part of the curriculum in upper secondary schools for the last 30 years. Through this case study of Practical mathematics 2P in the second year of the Norwegian upper secondary school, this main research question has been studied: Which perspectives on mathematical modelling can be identified in the different discourses of the mathematics curriculum, and which discursive and social practices can be identified within and between the discourses? These discourses are included in the study: The ideological (research literature and frameworks), the intended (the Norwegian curricula R94, L97, LK06 and LK20), the instructional (textbook tasks), the perceived (teacher interviews), the enacted (classroom observations) and the assessed (exam tasks) curriculum. The study is framed within case study theory, framework for curriculum assessment, Discourse Analysis and Positioning Theory. Moreover, a modelling cycle is central to the task analysis, and a theory of modelling perspectives is included in the meta-analysis. In this thesis, new approaches within mathematics education research are developed: To apply Positioning Theory to analyse the teaching of mathematical modelling, and a comprehensive curriculum assessment of mathematical modelling drawing on discourse theory. The different curriculum discourses are seen in relation to each other, and it illuminates how they influence each other and how discursive and social constructions allow certain understandings of mathematical modelling to develop. In the ideological and the intended curriculum, I identified a diversity of modelling perspectives, which require students to make assumptions and analyse and develop mathematical models to solve everyday problems. I did not to a large extent find traces of consumption of these curriculum discourses within the others. In the instructional curriculum, the textbook tasks can be solved by given procedures. Earlier given exam tasks were included in the textbooks. In the perceived curriculum teachers expressed they were not familiar with mathematical modelling from their own education and did not recognise mathematical modelling as relevant for mastering real-life situations. Within the enacted curriculum, mathematical modelling was connected to one content area of mathematics, and the teachers referred to the textbook and the exam to justify their choices regarding the teaching of mathematical modelling. That is, the assessed curriculum was consumed in the production of the instructional, perceived and enacted curriculum. Since the practices of the assessed curriculum, a 5-hour written exam, do not provide for solving holistic modelling tasks, this might lead to the development of certain understandings of mathematical modelling. Even if teachers acknowledged open-ended modelling tasks as relevant to the students’ lives, they did not experience that the curriculum discourses allowed or provided such tasks. At the closure of the thesis, I suggest how to reduce the gap between the educational debate and the everyday practices of teaching and learning mathematical modelling by pointing out the power relations revealed in this study.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Sentence initial bundles in L2 thesis writing: A comparative study of Chinese L2 and New Zealand L1 postgraduates’ writing

Multiword combinations perform a crucial role in signifying fluency, accuracy and idiomaticity in academic writing. Lexical bundles are recurrent, but not salient, multi-word combinations, for example, on the other hand, the fact that the, and it should be noted. They are important as they act as discourse frames to relate to new information or as interactional devices to mark the involvement of the writer and the reader. These functions can also be regarded as metadiscoursal functions, represented by metadiscoursal models. The use of lexical bundles in L2 academic writing has been the focus of a number of recent studies, but few studies distinguish bundles in different sentence positions, investigate bundles from the perspective of metadiscoursal functions, and explore the reasons underlying the bundle choices of L2 writers. The present study sought to fill these gaps by comparing the use of sentence initial bundles (i.e. bundles at the beginning of sentences) in Chinese L2 and New Zealand L1 thesis writing in the discipline of general and applied linguistics. Four collections were built: a Chinese masters thesis corpus, a New Zealand masters thesis corpus, a Chinese PhD thesis corpus and a New Zealand PhD thesis corpus. In comparing these four corpora, this study provided a detailed picture of the use of sentence initial bundles in Chinese postgraduate writing and an overall picture of variation in bundle use across different postgraduate levels of students in terms of frequency, structure and function. Semi-structured interviews with six Chinese postgraduates were conducted after the text analysis to understand the reasons for Chinese students’ bundle choices. The interviews were based on the expressions in participants’ original drafts, which were completely or partially overlapped with the sentence initial bundles generated from the corpus data. Chinese masters and PhD students were found to rely more heavily on sentence initial bundles, particularly interactive bundles. They preferred to start sentences with PP-based bundles, VP-based bundles, and conjunction + clause fragment bundles; but were less aware of the importance of NP-based bundles and anticipatory-it bundles. With regard to function, both the Chinese PhD and masters corpora were characterised by a heavy use of condition bundles and booster bundles; and a relatively low use of endophoric bundles, attitude bundles, hedge bundles, self-mention bundles and directive bundles of cognitive acts. In regard to bundle development, both groups of masters students were found to use more bundles than their PhD counterparts. However, the two PhD groups shared more bundles. More research-related NP-based bundles occurred in masters corpora, and more PP-based bundles and anticipatory-it bundles appeared in PhD students’ writing. A functional analysis showed that both groups of PhD students used more transition bundles, condition bundles, section-level frame bundles and self-mention bundles, but fewer attitude bundles. Interviews with six Chinese postgraduates revealed possible reasons for Chinese students’ bundle selection and use, which included but were not limited to interlingual transfer, classroom learning, noticing in reading, a lack of rhetorical confidence, and misunderstanding of rhetorical conventions. The findings suggest the need to go beyond the teaching of lexical bundles as a list of fixed multiword expressions. Teachers and learners are advised to address the pedagogical implications of bundle studies, and to use corpus-based tools (e.g. FLAX) to approach bundles as lexico-grammatical frames in which slots can be filled with a variety of words

Investigating Frequency and Type of Lexical Collocations in Applied Linguistics Journal Articles Written in English by Iranian and Norwegian Scholars

Master's thesis in Literacy StudiesIn today’s academic world, the research interest in corpus linguistics has shifted towards word co-occurrence rather than single words. Accordingly, a great body of literature has been devoted to investigations of recurrent word combinations in academic prose using frequency and dispersion parameters. This has resulted in analysis of corpus in different fields of study to collect comprehensive lists of academic collocations. Moreover, many contrastive studies have been conducted to compare the collocations used by native and non-native speakers of English. However, to the author’s knowledge, few studies have been conducted to compare the most frequent collocations in two corpora of research articles written by non-native speakers of English published in international journals in the field of applied linguistics. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study investigated the most frequent collocations used by Iranian and Norwegian scholars in a corpus of 17 articles published in the Journal of Pragmatics through a frequency-based approach. Nine out of 17 articles were written by Iranian scholars including 67,673 words and eight out of 17 articles were written by Norwegian scholars comprising of 64,682 words. The data of this study were collected using Collocation Extract software. The results of the study were presented in three phases. In the first phase, 15 most frequent lexical collocations in both corpora were identified which were classified under three types of lexical collocations. Based on what was obtained, Adj+N collocation type had the most proportion in the corpora while Adv+Adj type had the least proportion. In the second phase, the lexical collocations of the Iranian corpus were presented including a total of 818 collocations classified under five types. According to the results, Adj+N was the most frequent type while N+V was the least frequent one. Similar to the Iranian corpus, lexical collocations of the Norwegian corpus were identified. They were classified under four types including a total of 462, among which Adj+N was the most frequent type while Adv+Adj was the least frequent one. In the third phase, frequencies of lexical collocations were compared in the two corpora. According to the obtained results, the two corpora did not have any had significant difference in the use of all types of collocation except for Adj+N type of lexical collocations