Chinese Students' Writing in English
Implications from a corpus-driven study
- 184 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
Chinese students are the largest international student group in UK universities today, yet little is known about their undergraduate writing and the challenges they face. Drawing on the British Academic Written English corpus - a large corpus of proficient undergraduate student writing collected in the UK in the early 2000s - this study explores Chinese students' written assignments in English in a range of university disciplines, contrasting these with assignments from British students. The study is supplemented by questionnaire and interview datasets with discipline lecturers, writing tutors and students, and provides a comprehensive picture of the Chinese student writer today.
Theoretically framed through work within academic literacies and lexical priming, the author seeks to explore what we know about Chinese students' writing and to extend these findings to undergraduate writing more generally. In a globalized educational environment, it is important for educators to understand differences in writing styles across the student body, and to move from the widespread deficit model of student writing towards a descriptive model which embraces different ways of achieving success.
Chinese Students' Writing in English will be of value to researchers, EAP tutors, and university lecturers teaching Chinese students in the UK, China, and other English or Chinese-speaking countries.
Frequently asked questions
Information
ICLE: a learner corpus | BAWE: a corpus of undergraduate assignments | |
Factors specific to the conditions of writing | ||
(1) Authenticity | Tutors might ask students to produce argumentative essays specifically for inclusion in ICLE. | Texts are completed for the external purpose of satisfying course requirements and are thus naturalistic. |
(2) Genre | Mainly argumentative essays. | Wide range of genres. |
(3) Topic | Range of accessible, real world topics. Students unlikely to possess specialist knowledge and often employ anecdotes and personal experiences. | Students write assignments within their discipline. Most writing draws on external sources. |
(4) Influence of title | Choice of titles. These may promote a dialogic, personal style through use of āyouā and āyour opinionā and elicit a āforā and āagainstā answer format. | Varying degrees of choice provided, or students may devise their own title.ā Titles often complex, lengthy and refer to course-specific material. See sample titles in Appendix A. |
(5) Time allowed | Little preparation time. Little or no redrafting. | Unlimited time for preparation and drafting. |
(6) Combining writing with reading | No source texts though reference books and dictionaries are permitted. Writing is ācontent-freeā as it does not display textual plurality, i.e. there is no citation of other texts. Writing is thus a separate activity from reading. | Writing is ātext-responsible proseā (Leki and Carson, 1997: 41) in which students are expected to refer to other texts (cf. discussion of reading-based writing in Horowitz, 1986; Baba, 2009). |
(7) NS support | No NS help is allowed. | Students can make use of any available resources, e.g. comments from peers. |
(8) Length of texts | Short (500ā1,000 words) with the majority at the lower end of this range. | Variable lengths, ranging from 500 to 10,000 words. |
(9) Proficiency of the writing | All writing of āadvanced studentsā is collected (i.e. years 3 and 4 of undergraduate study). The writing is not graded on linguistic proficiency or other factors. | Only texts reaching a āproficientā standard are collected (i.e. scoring at least 60%). Criteria are devised by each department/lecturer and likely to include the display of discipline-specific knowledge and ideas, engagement with sources, task achievement, visuals, as well as linguistic expression. |
(10) Paper vs. electronic resources | Usually handwritten, then keyed in for the purpose of corpus compilation. | Electronic submission. A corpus comprising texts written on computer better reflects the reality for most students, since the writing process for each medium requires different cognitive resources (Stapleton, 2010). |
ICLE: A learner corpus | BAWE: A corpus of undergraduate assignments | |
Factors specific to the students | ||
(1) L1 | Each subcorpus is collected from a single L1 in one country. Subcorpora are organized according to studentsā L1s (e.g. āSWICLEā is the Swedish subcorpus of ICLE). | Range of L1s, representing the diversity of UK universities in the early 21st century. Texts are collected according to proficiency rather than L1. |
(2) Discipline background | Undergraduates in English language/literature | Undergraduates in a wide range of disciplines. |
(3) Year groups | āAdvancedā level i.e. third or fourth year undergraduates in their home university.1 | Four year groups: undergraduate years 1, 2 and 3, and Masters level (the latter are not included in the present study). |
(4) Range of institutions | Writing from an L1 group may be collected from one cohort in a single university in a country. | Four UK universities (Warwick, Coventry, Oxford Brookes and Reading). |
(5) Contributions per student | One text per student | Students may contribute between 1 and 10 texts.2 |
(6) Longitudinality | Cross-sectional corpus (i.e. collected from different learners at one point in time). | Mix of longitudinal3 and quasilongitudinal (i.e. collected at a single point in time but from students of different year groups). |
(7) Motivations | Studentsā motivation is unclear as texts are written in class but are (presumably) not assessed. Frequently, essays are effectively commissioned for the corpus by researchers asking student cohorts to write on assigned topics for a given time or within a given word range. | Students produce writing for assessments which contribute to their degree, so are highly motivated. Corpus collection occurs after texts are marked. |
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Contextualising Chinese studentsā literacy and language learning
- 3 Features of Chinese studentsā writing in the corpus
- 4 Variation across year groups
- 5 Disciplinary influences: student writing in Biology, Economics and Engineering
- 6 Discipline lecturer, writing tutor and university student perspectives
- 7 Conclusions
- Appendix A ICLE, BAWE and IELTS titles
- Appendix B Additional datasets and questions
- Appendix C Keywords in Chi123
- Appendix D Normalized and raw counts for Chapter Four
- Appendix E Keywords in Biology, Economics and Engineering
- Appendix F Useful websites
- References
- Index