Principales características del lenguaje de programación AHDL

teaching and learning

The relationship between corpus linguistics (CL) and language teaching (LT) is dynamic and interactive in that “resources, methods, and insights” gained from CL benefit LT and meanwhile LT provides “need-driven impulses” for CL research (Römer, 2009, p. 113). Pedagogical corpora applications can be both direct and indirect (Römer, 2009; Leech, 1997). Indirect applications refer to using corpus-based evidence to inform material writers when they are designing teaching syllabi and reference works (e.g. dictionaries and grammar books). For example, corpus-based analysis can reveal language items and structures of high frequency of occurrence in real communications, which can help with decisions about what to include in teaching materials (Gavioli & Aston, 2001; Römer, 2009). Corpus-based analysis also can reveal mismatches between

naturally-occurring language uses and those presented as examples in teaching materials and therefore can help with material adjustments (Römer, 2009). Direct applications, also broadly known as data-driven learning (DDL), refer to

accessing corpora directly by learners or less directly and controlled by teachers in order to explore patterns of language use(Römer, 2009). Both direct and indirect pedagogical applications can make use of general corpora and specialized corpora.

72 A growing number of studies have presented the application of corpora in the EAP classroom (Cargill & Adams, 2005; Cobbs, 1999; Gaskell & Cobb, 2004; Hong, 2010; Horst, Cobb & Nicolae, 2005; Johns, 1994; Lee & Swales, 2006; Thurstun & Candlin, 1998; Yoon, 2008) and in ESP and other specialized learning context (Farr, 2008; Hafner & Candlin, 2007; Weber, 2001). Thurstun and Candlin (1998) designed for university students corpus-based self-learning of “the most important, frequent and significant items of the vocabulary of academic English” (p. 267). This experimentfocused on a restricted set of vocabulary grouped in terms of their main rhetorical functions (e.g. reporting other research and expressing opinions etc.), which were selected according to their frequency of use in the University Word List cited in Nation (1990), the Microconcord Corpus of Academic Texts and the authors’ own perceptions. Students were guided to perform a chain of activities which includes examining the key word and surrounding words in concordances, understanding the use of the key word in context, and practicing using that word in their own writing.The intensive exposure to the selected vocabulary through concordance-based

activities helped students to “develop insights into the collocations and

grammatical structures with which the key words are associated” (Thurstun & Candlin, 1998, p. 271).

73 In Horst, Cobb and Nicolae’s (2005) vocabulary course, university ESL students learned academic vocabulary through a series of activities supplied by an online database, which includes reading articles of general and special academic topics, selecting, entering and sharing the words they would study, using concordancing to guess word meaning from multiple sentence contexts and to review learned words, and doing cloze quizzes. These activities were found to engage students in deeper and inductive learning of vocabulary and provide students more opportunities to learn words in contexts of concordance output.

Yoon (2008) reported an academic writing course for graduate ESL students in which the students were required to consult the Collins COBUILD Corpus in order to solve their sentence-level writing problems on their own and to send their searchresults to the instructor every week. The instructor combined these results and presented them to all students so the whole class could benefit. These students were observed to become “more independent writers” in the process of hands-on corpus search for solutions to language problems, which “promoted their perceptions of lexico-grammar and language awareness” (Yoon, 2008, p. 31).

Gaskell and Cobb (2004) provided intermediate ESL learners with feedback to their typical grammar errors in writing in the form of URL-link that directs to concordance search results of correct examples of the targeted

74 grammatical structure. The students were required to correct their errors and complete “error analysis forms which would disclose whether a concordance had been consulted and whether its pattern had been applied correctly” (Gaskell & Cobb, 2004, p.311). The end-of-course survey indicated that about half of the participants specifically expressed the usefulness of concordance work to their learning of grammar.

In contrast to the above studies that used general corpora, Lee and Swales (2006) designed a writing course for doctoral students that focused on using specialized corpora. These students first learned to apply concordance tools to analyzing and comparing language use and patterns in three specialized corpora of academic writing and speaking (Hyland’s Research Article Corpus, MICASE, Academic texts from the British Nation Corpus, p. 61). They were then required to compile two specialized corpora of their own writing and published research articles in their field and to present cross-corpora observations about the

lexico-grammar and discourse structures of their disciplinary genres. Feedback from the participants suggested that the corpus-based exploitation enhanced their awareness and knowledge about disciplinary writing.

In another Australian EAP context,postgraduates from Applied

Linguistics and Agricultural science were introduced to learn discipline-specific English and writing using the concordance software ConcApp in the corpus of

75 published journal articles across disciplines complied by the researchers (Cargill and Adams, 2005). The students were also encouraged after the sessions to construct their own discipline-specific corpus and consult it by ConcApp in order to help with their research writing. The end-of-session evaluation from the Agricultural group indicated their positive attitude towards using this tool and its potential benefits to developing their writing. However, an eight-month later follow-up survey suggests that this group virtually had not completed the further tasks as intended by the researchers, which could be resulted from the time and effort of building a specialized corpus (Cargill &Adams, 2005). This result would imply the need of constructing more specialized corpora and making them available to students so that they can conduct concordancing activities for

learning disciplinary writing in these corpora. The specialized corpus built in the current study would be such an example which consists of “successful” doctoral theses, and I hope to make accessible to students in future.

Other studies conducted comparative experiments of corpus-based and traditional language instruction. Hong (2010) found that both methodologies contributed to develop advanced Korean EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge of English determiners but that corpus-based exercises also helped learners build their cognitive ability “to obtain what they need to know using process-based corpus data” (p. 77). Çelik (2011) discovered that the group of Turkish EFL

76 students who practiced corpus-based exercises to learn the targeted academic words and prepositional phrases performed better in “a retention test three weeks after the post test administration” than did the group who learned through an online dictionary (p. 278). Similar to the case of Çelik (2011), Kaur and

Hegelheimer (2005) found the use of concordancing and together with an online dictionary resulted in intermediate ESL undergraduates’ better acquisition of academic words and ability to integrate these words into the writing task. This result corroborates Cobb’s (1999) finding that Arabic L2 students were more capable of transferring the acquired “definitional knowledge” of words to fitting blanks in two new texts of cloze passages when they involved in “constructing definitions for themselves using an adapted version of the computational tools of lexicographers” (p. 15).

A reflection of all studies reviewed above leads to the summary that: 1) corpus-based materials and concordancing activities are attested to be helpful to learn academic vocabulary and writing; 2) the process of searching language items and structures and analyzing them in concordance output can enable students to become more autonomous learners and even learners-as-researchers (e.g. Cargill & Adams, 2005; Lee & Swales, 2006); 3) the learning through concordance output consisting of examples of searched items in multiple contexts seems to foster students’ ability of using these items in their own

77 writing context (e.g. Cobbs, 1999; Kaur & Hegelheimer, 2005). As one of the pioneers of the DDL approach Johns (1994) stated, “the concordance printout offers a unique resource for the stimulation of inductive learning strategies – in particular the strategies of perceiving similarities and differences and of

hypothesis formulations and testing” (p. 297).

This self-exploratory process not only can raise students’ awareness of what to learn but also enable them to figure out how to learn in the context of corpus. Although there is a tendency to see the inductive and bottom-up learning as incompatible withthe top-down genre approach to EAP, Weber (2001) demonstrated a project in which non-native law students conducted

genre-analysis of the macrostructure of legal essays in a small corpus and then used concordances to explore lexical items that seem to be associated with the structures identified. This combining approach was found to help the students produce acceptable legal essays “both from a linguistic and a legal point of view” (p. 19). Similarly in her doctoral project, Chang (2010) designed a stance corpus that incorporates her analysis of the results of the co-articulations of Engagement options (and their linguistic realizations) forachieving different Moves in

introduction of research articles from social science and guided seven L1 Chinese postgraduates to learn stance-taking in research writing. Her findings showed that the writers’ awareness of the rhetorical structure of introduction and the

78 deployment of interpersonal stance was enhanced by the corpus-based learning (Chang, 2010).

This potential of awareness-raising can be seen as another nexus between corpus approach and genre approach to academic writing. While a corpus

approach canraise the writers’ awareness of more lexical and textual features by allowing them to analyze concordances as shown by the above reviewed studies, a genre approach can reveal the reasons behind certain linguistic and rhetorical choices. As Hyland (2003) maintained, the core of a genre approach is to “offer writers an explicit understanding of how texts in target genres are structured and why they are written in the ways they are” (p. 26). The analytical process of the rationale for particular language choices enables writers not only to clarify the reasons but also to acquire the metalanguage of talking and thinking about language (Hammond & Macken-Horarik, 1999; Hyland, 2003). The acquisition of metalanguage through a genre approach in fact, as Hyland (2003) argued, serves as “a necessary basis for critical engagement with cultural and textual practice” (p. 25). Jacob, Leech, and Holton (1995) showed the initiation of undergraduate ESL science students into the discussion sections of research reports by guiding them to examine the linguistic and rhetorical conventions of authentic text samples and the criteria for writing discussion sections.The students in turn can use such knowledge to write their own discussion and to

79 analyze and evaluate other discussion texts. Particularly, Abbuhal’s (2012) experimental investigation of the effect of explicit and awareness-raising instruction on the use of self-referential pronouns for authorial presence in argumentative essays showed that the instructed group used statistically significant more of the targeted devices in two essays and the quiz than did the non-instructed group, which runs somewhat counter to Freedman’s (1993) hypothesis that explicit instruction on genre knowledge may not be necessary or may even be harmful. Chang and Schleppegrell’s (2011) study also indicatedthat “Explicit discussion of expansive and contractive [Appraisal] options for

achieving key moves in introducing their research focuses novice L2 research writers on language in ways that help them expand their linguistic resources” (p. 148).

The present study, although it focuses on exploring interpersonal meaning-making in discussion sections of the doctoral theses, it also aims at sharing those corpus-based results with novice writers. It includes a small-scale pedagogical trial that engages Masters students in some exploratory tasks designed according to the corpus-generated findings so as to sharpen their awareness of linguistic features and rhetorical purposes of making interpersonal meanings in thesis/dissertation writing.

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