Gardner, Sheena

Nesi, Hilary

This short chapter shows how discipline and genre affect the use of phrasal and clausal features in university student writing. Recognition of the different phrasal and clausal complexity requirements of different types of student assignment could make a big difference to the way writing at this level is taught

Coventry University Pure Portal

 83  Complex, but in what way? A step towards greater understanding of academic writing proficiency  Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner  It is widely acknowledged that linguistic complexity is a mark of language proficiency, and until fairly recently this was measured in terms of the ability to subordinate clauses, as identified by T-unit length, for example (Beers and Nagy 2011). Although Halliday (1985) drew linguists’ attention to the greater phrasal density of formal writing, it has taken advances in multidimensional analysis (MDA) to fully demonstrate the ways in which professional academic writing is characterised by phrasal rather than clausal complexity (see e.g. Biber, Gray and Poonpon 2011). Nominalisation and complex noun phrases allow writers to focus on things/nouns which can be “frozen in time and examined” (Parkinson and Musgrave 2014). Similarly, agentless passives shift attention from the performers of an action to the informational detail (Staples et al. 2016).  The British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE) was constructed to facilitate the examination of writing that meets the standards for British university study, from first year undergraduate level through to Masters level, in a wide range of disciplines. It therefore represents a wider range of academic writing styles than those that have been examined in previous studies of linguistic complexity, enabling us to make finer distinctions between the ways complexity can be achieved. BAWE assignments can be grouped in terms of level, discipline, and/or genre, following a classification system which identifies 13 ‘genre families’ realizing different social and educational purposes. Staples et al.’s (2016) MDA study of a subset of the BAWE corpus found a decrease in clausal features and an increase in phrasal features across levels of university study, although this was more visible in science writing than in humanities texts. Our MDA study of the entire BAWE corpus (Gardner, Nesi and Biber 2018) builds on these findings, but also reveals how writers’ choices of phrasal and clausal features are affected by discipline and genre. These findings are important for students because if they produce the wrong genres or write in a discipline-inappropriate way they will probably fail their assignments. Table 1 shows how four distinct clusters of linguistic features relevant to complexity are positioned at the positive poles of our Dimensions 1, 2 and 4, and the negative pole of Dimension 1.   Dimension 1 positive:  Compressed Procedural Information  Dimension 2 positive:  Personal Stance  Premodifying nouns  0.69 Mental verbs 0.75 Common nouns 0.60 Stance verbs + that clause 0.60 Passives 0.56 Stance verbs + to clause 0.54 Action verbs 0.53 That deletion 0.52 Concrete nouns 0.52 Communication verbs 0.47 Quantity nouns 0.43 1st person pronouns 0.40    Past tense verbs  0.39  Dimension 1 negative:   Dimension 4 positive:   84  Stance toward the work of others Informational Density Communication verbs -0.39 Word length 0.87 Stance adverbials   -0.39 Nominalisations 0.80 Proper nouns -0.40 Attributive adjectives 0.50 Stance nouns + that clause -0.44 Abstract nouns 0.35 3rd person pronouns -0.55    Table 1: Four types of complexity bundles of features in BAWE  Each of these clusters is associated with a different type of text. Phrasal complexity achieved through passivisation and premodification (Dimension 1 positive) is typical of report genres in the sciences, whereas nominalisation and adjectival premodification (Dimension 4 positive) is more typical of Social Science essays, particularly at Masters level. Clausal complexity is favoured by essays in the soft disciplines and by more ‘conversational’ genres, but the former use epistemic adverbials and stance nouns with that- clauses (Dimension 1 negative), while the latter use more stance verbs (Dimension 2 positive). In Table 2, excerpts from BAWE corpus texts illustrate the features associated with each of these situational contexts.  Dimension 1 positive:  Compressed Procedural Information Dimension 2 positive:  Personal Stance Science Methodology Recounts &  Design Specifications Narrative Recounts (Reflective writing)  Problem questions e.g. Unlike the petrol four-stroke cycle that compresses a fuel and air mixture, the diesel cycle compresses only the air. (4th year Engineering Methodology Recount) e.g. I could have mentioned the school nurse or given the child line number, but decided that I wanted to alert the child to the fact that they can contact someone...  (2nd year Health Narrative Recount)    Dimension 1 negative:  Stance toward the work of others Dimension 4 positive: Informational Density Arts & Humanities Essays Levels 1 and 2 Social Sciences Level 4 Donne's dependency on God … draws parallels with Calvinism in the belief that a man who raised up the dead can certainly convert people...  (2nd year English Essay) ...the effectiveness of the various strategies in the implementation of nationalistic education. (4th year Sociology Proposal)    Table 2: Situational characteristics of complex texts    85  Recognition of the differences between these two types of phrasal complexity and two types of clausal complexity could make a big difference to the way university-level writing is taught.  References Beers, S. F., and Nagy, W. E. (2011). Writing development in four genres from grades three to seven: Syntactic complexity and genre differentiation. Reading and Writing, 24, pp. 183-202. Biber, D., Gray, B., and Poonpon, K. (2011) Should we use characteristics of conversation to measure grammatical complexity in L2 writing development? TESOL Quarterly 45 (1), pp. 5-35. Gardner, S., Nesi, H. and Biber, D. (2018) Discipline, level, genre: Integrating situational perspectives in a new MD analysis of university student writing. Advance online publication. Applied Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy005 Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1st ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Parkinson, J. and Musgrave, J. (2014) Development of noun phrase complexity in the writing of English for Academic Purposes students. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 14, pp. 48-59. Staples, S. Egbert, J. Biber, D. and Gray, B. (2016) Academic writing development at the university level: Phrasal and clausal complexity across level of study, discipline, and genre. Written Communication, 33 (2), pp. 149–183.  

Complex, but in what way? A step towards greater understanding of academic writing proficiency

https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/files/23791207/BAAL2019Nesi_Gardner.pdf

Complex, but in what way? A step towards greater understanding of academic writing proficiency

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Coventry University Pure Portal