Chinese Students' Writing in English

Implications from a corpus-driven study

Maria Leedham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135100100
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Focus

Academic success in Higher Education largely rests on an ability to write well (e.g. Douglas, 2010; Hewings, 1999; Leki and Carson, 1994; Lillis and Scott, 2008; Nation, 2008; North, 2005a). At undergraduate and postgraduate level, written assignments are usually the primary means through which students are judged, given feedback and ultimately awarded a degree. Given that success or failure in tertiary education is likely to have a great impact on the lives and careers of individual students, the ability to write in the preferred ways of the academy is of paramount importance. This reliance on assessed writing can present difficulties for both ‘home’ students whose first language (L1) is English and who have gone through the UK secondary education system, and the growing number of international students, the largest cohort of whom are Chinese. Both groups have to contend with difficulties such as producing extended pieces of writing for assessment, learning to write within the accepted style of their discipline and writing within a large and often unfamiliar range of text types or genres (see discussion of genres later in this chapter). However, relatively few large-scale studies have been carried out on assessed undergraduate writing from native speaker (NS) students in the UK, and fewer still have been conducted on non-native speaker (NNS) students’ tertiary level writing, despite the recent rapid growth in numbers of international students in UK universities (UKCISA, 2011).

The goal of this book is to explore current undergraduate student writing, the challenges this presents and the diversity of responses to this challenge within the student body, through examination of a dataset of Chinese and British students’ assignments submitted to UK universities in the early twenty-first century. L1 Chinese students’ writing (with Mandarin, Cantonese or other dialect as their first language) was selected as this group are the largest in the UK undergraduate student body after British students with English as their first language. The texts are stored as electronic files or ‘corpora’ (singular, corpus) and are investigated using corpus software, supported by qualitative reading, and findings are corroborated through interviews with discipline lecturers and students. While the focus of the study is on these two groups within the UK context, I hope that the book is also useful to people working in other Higher Education contexts.

The remainder of this introductory chapter outlines learner corpus research and the academic literacies’ framing of this study, before describing the data and methodology employed and finally outlining the lexical priming theory used to explain students’ changing language use.

Previous research: learner corpora

The majority of previous large-scale studies of both L1 Chinese students’ writing and and second language (L2) English student writing in general have been corpus studies concentrating on data sets of unassessed, extremely short, argumentative essays collected mainly from non-UK universities, and collectively known as ‘learner corpora’. Studies of Chinese-only learner corpora include Chuang and Nesi (2006), Cross and Papp (2008), Guo (2006), Hyland and Milton (1997), Wen and Clement (2003); and studies of writing from groups of NNSs include Granger and Rayson (1998), Paquot (2010) and Petch-Tyson (1998). The short essays within learner corpora are, however, very different from assessed undergraduate writing since they require neither background reading nor research and consist of prose-only responses to set titles soliciting the writer’s opinion on a general knowledge topic. While the results of such studies provide useful insights into features of NNS writing within these particular data sets, in this book I argue that their findings cannot be unquestioningly extended to other genres of writing, in particular to the extended pieces of writing required at undergraduate level.

This section contrasts the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, version 2, released in 2009) and the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE, completed in 2007)¹ as corpora compiled from, respectively, deficit and descriptive perspectives. The two corpora have different aims: the goal of the ICLE project was to uncover similarities and differences between the English language competence of L2 English students from a variety of L1 backgrounds. In contrast, the underpinnings of the BAWE project were to explore the genres of writing employed at undergraduate and Masters level in UK universities; thus for this project the L1 of students was recorded but not taken into account in the initial setting-up. A similar project to BAWE has also been conducted in the US, producing the Michigan Corpus of Higher Level Student Papers (MICUSP; see Ädel and Romer, 2012).

Most of what is known about non-native speaker writing in English comes from learner corpora studies, yet, as Nesi (2008b: 4) points out:

although learner corpora provide some insight into the type of tasks language teachers set, they do not represent the type of writing undertaken outside the language classroom. In contrast to language learning tasks, writing for academic or professional purposes usually requires advance preparation, extensive referencing to extratextual sources or data, and accommodation to the norms of a particular discourse community.

The short argumentative essays comprising learner corpora thus do not adequately represent the multi-genred, disciplinary specific assessed writing required at undergraduate level. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 compare ICLE, since this is the most extensively exploited of the available learner corpora, with BAWE, as a recently created corpus within the under-researched area of undergraduate writing.

Table 1.1 Comparison of learner corpus texts and authentic undergraduate assignments

	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 ‘you’ and ‘your opinion’ and elicit a ‘for’ and ‘against’ answer format.	Varying degrees of choice provided, or students may devise their own title.^† 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 ‘content-free’ 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 ‘text-responsible prose’ (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 (500–1,000 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 ‘advanced students’ 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 ‘proficient’ 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).

† Information on whether a title is devised by a student or provided for them is not given in BAWE contextual data.

The majority of the critiques made about ICLE could, however, also be applied to Chinese-specific learner corpora (such as those compiled from IELTs, ToEFL, NMEt, CET or other test data.)² As the ICLE corpus is highly influential within NNS writing research, it is likely that its design has influenced later compilations of learner corpora.

While ICLE is a more homogeneous corpus since all texts comprise the same genre, similar question types and equivalent length, the BAWE corpus includes texts from a variety of genres (e.g. case studies, reports, reflective writing, exercises), question types and text lengths. Of particular significance are the varied conditions of writing of the two corpora: in contrast with the texts written specifically for inclusion in ICLE, the BAWE corpus texts were produced in a naturalistic setting, that is, they were collected after the act of writing. This accords with Tognini-Bonelli’s (2001: 55) view of corpus linguistics dealing primarily with language in use which is ‘assumed to be genuine communication of people going about their normal business’. To address these shortfalls, a new corpus of L2 English, tertiary-level assignments is currently under development which will contain texts in different disciplines across a range of countries (see Paquot et al., 2013, for a comparison of ICLE and the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase [VESPA]).

Table 1.2 Comparison of learner corpus texts and authentic undergraduate assignments

	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 students’ L1s (e.g. ‘SWICLE’ 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	‘Advanced’ 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 longitudinal^3 and quasilongitudinal (i.e. collected at a single point in time but from students of different year groups).
(7) Motivations	Students’ 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.

1 ‘Advanced’ level is a wide category. Research using the Common European Framework categories suggests this varies between B2 and C2 level across ICLE, and that different subcorpora vary (see discussion in Thewissen et al., 2006). Generally, no account is taken in ICLE research of the educational contexts of each country (Tono, 2009).

2 Students taking joint honours degrees may provide up to 20 assignments to the BAWE corpus (10 per discipline), thought in practice very few students submitted the maximum number.

3 As collection was carried out from 2005–7, student contributors may have subm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Contextualising Chinese students’ literacy and language learning
• 3 Features of Chinese students’ 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