Browsing Department of Language and Linguistics by Issue Date

Halvvägs på väg vart? Storstadssatsningen i Rosengård 2000-2001
Popoola, Margareta; Bevelander, Pieter; Carlsson, Benny; Broomé, Per; Salameh, Eva Kristina; Staaf, Patricia; Wigerfelt, Berit : Malmö högskola, IMER (2002)	REPORT

Sticking one’s nose in the data : Evaluation in phraseological sequen...
Levin, Magnus; Lindquist, Hans Journal article in ICAME Journal : Aksis (2007)	peer-reviewed scientific ARTICLE

English abstract:

With the realization that introspection and the use of dictionaries constitute a precarious foundation for studies of metaphor and metonymy, corpora have in recent years been used increasingly in the endeavour to explore the authentic use of figurative language (see, e.g. Deignan 2005; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006). Similarly, investigations of phraseology (e.g. Moon 1998) have come to rely heavily on modern large-scale corpora, while analyses of evaluative lexis in the tradition of John Sinclair (e.g. Sinclair passim; Hunston and Thompson 1999; Stubbs 2001) have a theoretical commitment to the corpus as an indispensable tool. The present paper brings together these theoretical strands. It is commonplace in cognitive linguistics that human cognition is embodied (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Langacker 1987, 1991; Kövecses and Szabó 1996; Gibbs and Wilson 2002; Gibbs et al. 2004). Therefore it is no surprise that many phraseological sequences are built up around words related to the body, and in this corpus-based case study we have chosen to focus on the evaluative functions of metonymic and metaphorical sequences containing the noun nose. In comparison with other body parts, such as the hand and the mouth, the nose is fairly restricted in its use. Whereas in some cultures, like Maori and Inuit, the nose has an additional social importance as it is used for greeting, in western societies the nose seems to have predominantly negative or humorous connotations (cf. Gogol’s The Nose). One can only speculate about the reasons for this: perhaps it is the predominance of bad smells, or the association with snoring and the excretion of mucus. Some sequences containing nose also imply that the agent is behaving like an animal. As an example of the latter type of connotations, consider (1) to (3) with the metonymic sequence stick one’s nose somewhere. This sequence is most frequently negative, as in (1), sometimes slightly ironic, as in (2), and occasionally positive, as in (3) (see further section 4.1.1). (1) The Steinbrenner we remember was always sticking his nose in where it’s not wanted. (NYT 1996) (2) As soon as it’s nice enough to stick your nose outside, this place is packed (…) (Ind 2000) (3) Stick your nose in it. Grind it out. You can’t be turning the other cheek all the time. (NYT 1990) In contrast to most studies of evaluative language we will consider both instances where speakers express their opinions about other people’s activities and cases where the disapproval is on the part of the agent in the clause without the speakers conveying their opinions of this.

Academic Writing in a Multi-lingual and Multi-disciplinary Context
Finnegan, Damian; Kauppinen, Asko; Wärnsby, Anna (2011) The Role of the Student Experience in Shaping Academic Writing Development in Higher Education, European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW), 29th June – 1st July 2011 University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland	other

English abstract:

Damian Finnegan (damian.finnegan@mah.se) Asko Kauppinen (asko.kauppinen@mah.se) Anna Wärnsby (anna.warnsby@mah.se) Academic Writing in a Multi-lingual and Multidisciplinary Context One crucial challenge of academic writing concerns the increasing heterogenisation of student populations. In many writing classes, we now find “any combination of native-born, international, refugee, permanent resident, and naturalized students,” exhibiting considerable linguistic diversity and multiple levels of English proficiency (Preto-Bay and Hansen, 2006; see also Hall, 2009). At the same time, interest towards academic writing in European higher education is growing, yet resources for teaching do not reflect this. Moreover, the wider student base demands practical application from their writing courses, not theoretical knowledge of language skills (see, for example, Anderson 1983, 2009 on procedural vs. declarative knowledge). To show how these problems can be addressed, we discuss the course Academic Writing in English offered at Malmö University, Sweden, which currently enrolls approximately 300 students per year. The course design is explicitly based on the general model of information processing, which assumes that “complex behavior builds on simple processes” (McLaughlin and Heredia, 1996, p. 213). The focus of all learning activities is on acquisition of procedural knowledge geared towards comprehension and production. One distinctive feature of this course is the very tight integration of electronic resources and other teaching material. This provides student populations various types of continuous feedback and highly individualised learning paths. In this paper, we present and evaluate empirical data pertaining to students’ experience of the content, structure and resources in this course. We also discuss the preliminary results obtained through tests administered before, during and after the course. References Anderson, J. R. 2009. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. 7th edition. New York: Worth Publishers. Anderson, J. R. 1983. The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hall, Jonathan. 2009. “WAC/WID in the Next America: Redefining Professional Identity in the Age of the Multilingual Majority.” The WAC Journal. Vol. 20, November. 33-49. McLaughlin, B. and Hereda, J. L. C. 1996. “Information-processing Approaches to Research on Second Language Acquisition and Use.” In Ritchie, W. C. and Bhatia, T. K. (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. San Diego: Academic Press, 213-228. Preto-Bay, Ana Maria and Kristine Hansen. 2006. “Preparing for the Tipping Point: Designing Writing Programs to Meet the Needs of the Changing Population.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2, Fall. 37-57.

Eire Pres Final Draft 5.pdf (6.676Mb)

Automated Feedback, Student Experience and Writing as a Process
Finnegan, Damian; Kauppinen, Asko; Wärnsby, Anna (2012) Academic Writing in a Changing World, Second International Conference on Academic Writing (IFAW II) July 31 – August 1 2012 , Tel Aviv, Israel	other

English abstract:

Damian Finnegan (damian.finnegan@mah.se) Asko Kauppinen (asko.kauppinen@mah.se) Anna Wärnsby (anna.warnsby@mah.se) Automated Feedback, Student Experience and Writing as a Process Many EFL learners struggle with issues pertaining to grammar, style and idiomaticity, and, traditionally, language teachers spend a lot of time addressing these mechanical errors (see Zamel 1985). This corrective practice seems to shape learner expectations of the type of feedback that is most effective or useful to them (Hedgcock and Lefkowitz 1996). In the context of teaching academic writing, this may easily pose a problem for allocating teacher resources away from teaching writing as a process to taking care of the learner language issues. Nowadays, e-platforms designed specifically to cater for academic writing offer a new range of feedback possibilities for teachers. Tasks pertaining particularly to language use can, for example, be created so that the feedback is fully automated. The easy and immediate access to such feedback is beneficial for learners with different proficiency levels (Brandl 1995). In our course, in order to free teacher resources for feedback on students’ critical thinking, treatment of sources, structure and context, we used automated feedback, i.e. direct corrections with metalinguistic comments generated within the e-platform, to feedback on skill building exercises pertaining to grammar, style and idiomaticity. Previous research indicates that direct corrective feedback on mechanical errors is efficient in facilitating learning (see Sheen 2007 for an overview of the field). In a pilot study on student experience of the writing process, we noticed that the level of student satisfaction with this automated feedback was surprisingly high and valued as much as the extensive written teacher feedback on papers submitted for examination. In our current study, we explore the impact automated feedback has on student experience of learning skills pertaining to the mechanics of writing as described above from beginner to advanced students of academic writing. Some of the factors we consider are the immediacy/remoteness of the feedback, the extent of the metalinguistic comment and the connection of the skill building exercises to the teaching materials. References Brandl, K. K. 1995. Strong and Weak Students' Preferences for Error Feedback Options and Responses. The modern Language Journal, vol. 79, no. 2, 194-211. Hedgcock, J. and Lefkowitz, N. 1996. Some Input on Input: Two Analyses of Student Response to Expert Feedback in L2 Writing. The Modern Language Journal, vol. 80, no. 3, 287-308. Sheen, Y. 2007. The Effect of Focused Written Corrective Feedback and Language Aptitude on ESL Learners' Acquisition of Articles. TESOL Quaterly, vol. 41, no. 2, 255-283. Zamel, V. 1985. Responding to student writing. TESOL Quaterly, 19, 79-101.

Automated Feedback Il.pdf (11.36Mb)

MUCH: The Malmö University-Chalmers Corpus of Academic Writing as a P...
Eriksson, Andreas; Finnegan, Damian; Kauppinen, Asko; Wiktorsson, Maria; Wärnsby, Anna; Withers, Peter (2012) 10th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference (TALC 2012), 11th-14th July 2012, Warsaw, Poland	conference POSTER

English abstract:

MUCH: THE MALMÖ UNIVERSITY-CHALMERS CORPUS OF ACADEMIC WRITING AS A PROCESS Andreas Eriksson, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg; Damian Finnegan, Asko Kauppinen, Maria Wiktorsson, Anna Wärnsby, Malmö University, Malmö; Peter Withers, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen This poster introduces a recently-launched corpus project which aims to compile and monitor various text drafts involved in the writing process of EFL students in higher education. The corpus material will consist of three drafts of undergraduate, master or PhD student texts. Additionally, the corpus will contain a collection of self-reflective papers. Papers will be collected from approximately 400 students per year over a three-year period. In addition to parts-of-speech tagging, the corpus will include peer comments between the first and second drafts and teacher comments between the second and third drafts, as well as annotations of information structure and rhetorical structures. Upon its completion, the corpus will consist of about 500,000 words, excluding the metadata and peer and teacher comments. The corpus is primarily an academic writing research corpus, but also a pedagogic and linguistic corpus, and it is the combination of these perspectives that we would like to emphasise. One important aim of the project is to narrow the gap between writing pedagogy and the use of corpora for teaching and learning purposes. In writing pedagogy, the focus has been on issues such as writing as social action (Miller 1984), feedback processes (Hyland & Hyland 2006) and the development of academic literacy (Lea & Street 1998, Lillis & Scott 2007, Street 2004), whereas there has been a tendency in corpus-driven and corpus-based pedagogy to focus on linguistic aspects of language learning, such as vocabulary, grammar and phraseology. This tendency is, for instance, evidenced in Flowerdew’s (2010) comprehensive overview of how corpora have been used in writing instruction. There are obviously notable exceptions to this somewhat sweeping description (see e.g. Charles 2007 and Flowerdew 2008). However, a lot more can be done to merge these two perspectives. We believe that a corpus containing drafts tagged for information structure, rhetorical structures, and linguistic structures as well as peer and teacher feedback is an important step in such a process. In this poster, we will establish the rationale for the project by exemplifying how the corpus can be used for research purposes as well as teaching and learning purposes. We will show how the corpus can be employed in the study of: 1) peer and teacher comments; 2) thesis statements and how these are formed, located and realised in students’ writing processes; and 3) linguistic structures, such as elements recurring in thesis statements. References: Charles, M. 2007. Reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches to graduate writing: Using a corpus to teach rhetorical functions. Journal of English for Specific Purposes 6: 289-302. Flowerdew, L. 2008. Corpus linguistics for academic literacies mediated through discussion activities. In D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), The Oral-Literate Connection: Perspectives on L2, speaking, writing and other media interactions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 268-287 Flowerdew, L. 2010. Using a corpus for writing instruction. In O’Keeffe, Anne & McCarthy, Michael (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 444-457. Hyland, K. & Hyland, F. (eds.). 2006. Feedback in Second Language Writing: Contexts and Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, C. R. 1984. Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70:151-167. Lea, M. R. and Street, B. (1998) Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education 23(2): 157–172. Lillis, T. & Scott, M. 2007. Defining Academic Literacies Research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1): 5-32. Street, B. (2004) Academic Literacies and the ‘new orders’: implications for research and practice in student writing in higher education. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences, 1(1): 9–20.

MUCH_poster7_final.pdf (400.3Kb)

On the Importance of Teaching Writing to Teacher Trainees
Finnegan, Damian; Kauppinen, Asko; Wärnsby, Anna; Salih, Jasmin (2012) 14th Writing Development in Higher Education (WDHE) International Conference 2012, 2nd – 4th July 2012, Liverpool, UK	other

English abstract:

Damian Finnegan (damian.finnegan@mah.se) Asko Kauppinen (asko.kauppinen@mah.se) Anna Wärnsby (anna.warnsby@mah.se) On the Importance of Teaching Academic Writing to Teacher Trainees Many EFL learners struggle with issues pertaining to grammar, style and idiomaticity, and, traditionally, language teachers spend a lot of time addressing these mechanical errors (Zamel 1985). This corrective practice seems to shape learner and teacher expectations of the type of feedback that is most effective or useful to learners (Hedgcock and Lefkowitz 1996). In the context of teaching academic writing, this may easily pose a problem for allocating teacher resources away from teaching writing as a process to taking care of the learner language issues. In the new Swedish school curriculum for English, however, the ability to write for different purposes and audiences and the familiarity with different text types is made prominent (Lgr11). Therefore, the teachers’ ability to reflect on the writing process as such and not only on the mechanical learner errors is crucial for the pupils’ achievement of the learning outcomes specified in the curriculum. At Malmö University, we facilitated systematic instruction to teacher trainees, amongst others, through the creation of courses in academic writing in English across the curriculum (WAC). The design of our courses is explicitly based on the general model of information processing, which assumes that “complex behavior builds on simple processes” (McLaughlin and Heredia, 1996, p. 213). The focus of all learning activities is on acquisition of procedural knowledge geared towards comprehension and production (see Anderson 1983, 2009). Specifically, we gear our courses to equip teacher trainees with tools that can later aid them in their reflection on elements of the writing process other than those that are traditionally addressed in the language classroom. In this paper, we address particularly the increased ability in teacher trainees to reflect upon their own and their peers’ writing. We look at their ability to identify core elements of the writing process, for example, purpose, audience, genre, structure, critical thinking, and meta-cognitive analysis. These data have been compiled in the form of self-reflective papers produced by teacher trainees upon completion of our course. References Anderson, J. R. 2009. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. 7th edition. New York: Worth Publishers. Anderson, J. R. 1983. The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hall, Jonathan. 2009. “WAC/WID in the Next America: Redefining Professional Identity in the Age of the Multilingual Majority.” The WAC Journal. Vol. 20, November. 33-49. Hedgcock, J. and Lefkowitz, N. 1996. Some Input on Input: Two Analyses of Student Response to Expert Feedback in L2 Writing. The Modern Language Journal, vol. 80, no. 3, 287-308. McLaughlin, B. and Hereda, J. L. C. 1996. “Information-processing Approaches to Research on Second Language Acquisition and Use.” In Ritchie, W. C. and Bhatia, T. K. (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. San Diego: Academic Press, 213-228. Preto-Bay, Ana Maria and Kristine Hansen. 2006. “Preparing for the Tipping Point: Designing Writing Programs to Meet the Needs of the Changing Population.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2, Fall. 37-57.

WDHE_2012_copy.pdf (2.371Mb)

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Swedish abstract:	Recension av: Ute Römer: Progressives, patterns, pedagogy. A corpus-driven approach to English progressive forms, functions and didactics. Amsterdam : Benjamin, 2005. ISBN 90-272-2289-4

FOOT and MOUTH: The phrasal patterns of frequent nouns.
Lindquist, Hans; Levin, Magnus Book chapter in Phraseology: An interdisciplinary perspective : John Benjamins (2008)	BOOK CHAPTER

Stubbing your toe against a hard mass of facts: Corpus data and the p...
Lindquist, Hans Book chapter in Language, People, Numbers. Corpus Linguistics and society : Rodopi Language and Computers;64 (2008)	BOOK CHAPTER

English abstract:	Review of Marianne Hundt, Nadja Nesselhauf and Carolin Biewer (eds.): Corpus linguistics and the web. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 2007. ISBN 978-90-420-2128-0.