Analysis of the corpus

As a teacher of the students represented i n the JPU Corpus, I was one of the readers of the scripts submitted. Receiving multiple drafts from the writers, I formed a view of the content and quality of these submissions, many of which I read repeatedly as students had made revisions. Studying and evaluating the scripts also gave me an insight into student writing that would inform the hypotheses tested on the basis of the corpus. A host of lexical and syntactic investigations are made possible by the corpus—the ones offered here rep-resent what I regarded as pedagogically most relevant inquiries that I was able to conduct with the software available. As no tagging was performed on the data, these studies are restricted to those types of analysis that can be per-formed by reference to frequency information and lexical patterns identified in KWIC concordances.

4.3.1 Hypothesis 1

The first hypothesis suggested that the RRS w i l l contain a number of i n -accurate uses of the definite article. There were three reasons for this hypothesis. Of the sixteen students i n the RR Language Practice course, fifteen used to be teachers of Russian, a language that employs no article. As H u n g a r i a n definite article usage is governed differently, there was a probability of marked negative transfer i n the second foreign language,

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English. The second reason for such a hypothesis was that these students had a relatively short time to prepare for their university education, a condition that may not have been counterbalanced by the increased amount of Language Development tuition they received. The third reason was that this group did not enjoy the opportunity of submitting multiple drafts, and thus the chance of error was assumed to be higher.

To test this hypothesis, I generated the KWIC concordance of the RRS and analyzed the citations for the definite article. Of the 1,680 occurrences, 103 were eliminated, as these were quotations from various sources. Of the remaining 1577 citations, I hypothesized erroneous uses would reach about 100, or about every sixth i n one hundred co-texts.

The hypothesis was rejected: the total number of errors i n the use of the definite article was 43. The result shows the effectiveness of students' learning and applying the rules of using the definite article. However, as the study could not investigate the frequency of error of not using a definite article, the finding cannot be regarded as conclusive. Also, as co-texts cannot always provide sufficient information on context, the 1,577 samples may have con-tained more erroneous uses, which could not be determined on the basis of subjective parsing.

In the second phase of the analysis of the corpus, transitional phrases were investigated—involving the full corpus and by comparing observations i n the PGS and the WRSS. Hypothesis 2 was concerned with the distribution of frequencies of the following discourse markers: but, however, still, yet, on the

other hand, and nevertheless. In particular, the hypothesis suggested that of these phrases the coordinating conjunction but would be most frequent, and that i n sentence initial position this frequency would remain. For emphatic change of focus or argument, students were encouraged to employ the con-junction, besides opting for what appear to be more preferred choices i n academic writing, such as however, and on the other hand. Rather than using such wordy transitions as "however, it should be pointed out that" or "yet, it is important to note that," the simplicity of but often results in effective sign posting, as confirmed by such authors as Strunk and White (1979) and Zinsser (1998).

To test the hypothesis, the frequencies of these phrases were tabulated for the main corpus and the three subcorpora. The results are shown i n Table

4.3.2 Hypothesis 2

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Table 23: The frequencies of contrasting transitional phrases i n the JPU Corpus and two subcorpora i n sentence-initial position

Phrase J P U | | WRSS PGS

But 308 75 61

However 138 23 47

Still 21 7 3

Yet 24 3 2

On the other hand 35 3 13

Nevertheless 25 5 7

As the table indicates, Hypothesis 2 has been confirmed: i n sentence-initial position, the coordinating conjunction is most frequent i n the main corpus and i n the two writing subcorpora, with four of the transitional phrases rep-resented by much lower frequencies.

4.3.3 Hypothesis 3

Clarity of written expression, i n whatever genre, is enhanced by the use of concrete verbal phrases that accurately identify the reader's intentions and adequately cross-reference an earlier segment of the text. This is especially true of academic writing, which needs to operate with valid reporting verbs.

However, this area appears to be a source of problems for the non-native writer, whose vocabulary may not be wide enough and who has not had ex-tensive reading experience in the target language.

One early insight I gained as a writing tutor into both native speaker and non-native speaker academic texts was the frequent use of the phrase

"mentioned above/' and its many active and passive variants. I identified three potential problems with this usage. First, on many occasions, the act of mentioning appeared to be a form of hedging, referring to an important point in the argument made earlier. Instead of finding a "mention" of these points, I would often locate a discussion, a definition, an illustration. The first prob-lem, then, was that of validity. The second reason I became interested i n the phrase was related to the adverbial component. Referring to the antecedent as being "above" appeared to characterize most formal text types, such as those i n the legal profession, and i n instructions. Its use in academic writing may contain the intentional or unintentional desire to make the text more formal than one may consider necessary. The writing courses aimed to sensi-tize students to this issue so they could look for alternative expressions. The third problem area was maybe the most relevant from a linguistic and peda-gogical point of view: what many authors referred to this way appeared in the previous sentence. While another frequent use of the phrase appears to be i n concluding sections of papers, with the adverb being an all-purpose filler for

"in this paper," the frequency of the phrase was also high in sentences making

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an anaphoric reference to a point in the previous sentence. In these contexts, simple deictic phrases would suffice.

Hypothesis 3 suggested that there would be a relatively high frequency of

"above" i n anaphoric verbal phrases, and that a significant verbal collocate would be mention. Further, the hypothesis claimed that i n the PGS and WRSS these frequencies would drop, as a result of the practice students had i n those courses. To verify or reject it, the hypothesis was submitted to the fol-lowing analysis. First, I obtained the KWIC concordances for the variants mentioned above, above mentioned and above-mentioned. The frequencies of these expressions were recorded for the main corpus and the two subcorpora, as shown in Table 24.

Table 24: The frequencies of "mentioned above"/ "above mentioned" i n the JPU Corpus and two subcorpora