Corpus Linguistics for English for Academic Purposes

Vander Viana, Aisling O'Boyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000506600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

This book shows how corpus analyses can enhance students', practitioners' and researchers' knowledge of academic language. The book provides a reader-friendly discussion of the key concepts, practices and research applications of corpus linguistics which are relevant to the EAP community.

The volume:

• empowers readers to compile and analyze EAP-relevant corpora to support their practice;

• draws on open-access resources, allowing readers in all contexts to engage in corpus analyses;

• examines how corpus studies have advanced the description of spoken, written and computer-mediated academic discourses;

• contains numerous reflective and hands-on tasks.

Corpus Linguistics for English for Academic Purposes is an essential book for EAP students, practitioners and researchers who wish to develop corpus analytical skills to support their learning, teaching and research practice. It is equally important to novice corpus linguists who wish to find out how they can contribute to the ever-expanding area of EAP.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003245988-1

Given the changing landscapes of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), many reading this book will come from a range of positions: students; teachers, lecturers and/or educators; administrators; researchers and more. You may have decided to read this book to assist in your learning of EAP, your teaching of EAP, your education of future EAP practitioners, your institutional decisions about EAP provision, your EAP research and so on. This list is not only about intended readers. It illustrates the reach of EAP into the lives of many across the globe. Acknowledging this wide scope, we have decided to refer to ‘the EAP community’ as a group and to use the phrase ‘EAP students, practitioners and researchers’ to encompass the range of activities with which you may be engaged.

As you will have realized, we are making an assumption about you and your involvement – either directly or indirectly – in EAP. It is for this primary readership that the book has been conceived. However, we would argue that the readership is not limited to the EAP community. It may also be of interest, for instance, to novice corpus linguists wishing to learn about the applications of Corpus Linguistics (CL) to a specific area of English language learning/teaching/research and to the more experienced corpus linguist looking for a resource to be adopted in his/her university classes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

In this opening chapter, we provide a brief overview of EAP (Section 1.1) to ensure that we, the authors, and you share some initial common ground, therefore paving our joint exploration of the field in the remainder of this book. We then engage you in our discussions of why this book is needed and our goal in writing it (Section 1.2). Before we embark on the examination of CL for EAP, we offer an overview of the topics, themes and tasks of this book (Section 1.3).

1.1 What is EAP?

EAP belongs to the wider field of English language education. It originated as a branch of English for Specific Purposes (ESP; e.g. Hutchinson & Waters, 1987) before developing and maturing into a life of its own. EAP refers to the learning, teaching and research of language and discourse practices in English that people use to study and/or work in higher education. It draws on a range of subject areas such as Applied Linguistics, Education and Linguistics.

EAP teaching and learning are primarily associated with higher education institutions (HEIs – e.g. colleges and universities) and language institutes across the globe, but it also takes place in school settings (cf. Humphrey, 2016). With regard to the provision in HEIs, EAP courses vary in relation to whether or not they are credit-bearing or fee-charging. Timewise, these courses are differentiated based on whether they prepare students for participation in university or facilitate students’ ongoing participation in academic contexts. The former courses are known as pre-sessional and are offered before students start their university-level academic studies; the latter are described as in-sessional courses and they are offered alongside students’ academic degrees. In addition to classes, consultations on a one-to-one basis may be available, typically focusing on individual writing tuition.

In relation to its focus, EAP is divided into English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) and English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). EGAP refers to language and practices which may be used across all disciplines whereas ESAP focuses on discipline-specific language and practices. EAP practitioners may be cautious about ESAP because of the perceived requirement to have knowledge of the specific discipline. This would be similar to the perception of ESP practitioners’ requiring knowledge of, for instance, air traffic control in order to teach a course for professionals in this field (see Viana, Bocorny & Sarmento, 2019). In either case, this impression does not hold true – EAP or ESP practitioners do not need to have a formal degree and/or first-hand knowledge of the focal discipline. As you will see throughout this book, CL research (i.e. simply defined for the moment as research based on textual collections – see Chapter 3 for details) offers insights which are relevant to both EGAP and ESAP.

Discussing the origins of EAP, Ding and Bruce (2017) point out that CL is one of the five important research themes which have influenced EAP syllabi, materials, and pedagogy; the others being Systemic Functional Linguistics, Genre Theory, Academic Literacies and Critical EAP. For us, CL provides the tools and techniques which enable EAP students, practitioners and researchers to become familiar with linguistic and discoursal practices of academic texts. It enables ways of seeing how communication in different disciplines takes place (e.g. Hyland, 2009; Swales, 1990). Once we have empirical evidence of how each discipline operates, there is greater potential for both access to and critique of disciplinary epistemologies.

1.2 Why have we written this book?

The driving force for this book is our intention to enable greater use of CL to address issues that EAP students, practitioners and researchers face in changing educational landscapes. We do not indoctrinate anyone in CL (i.e. we approach it critically, and we encourage students and colleagues to do so too), nor are we a brigade of English language speakers seeking to uphold the so-called English language standard. The question posed in the section heading assumes special relevance then. The increasing internationalization of education and the use of English as a language of communication in academic contexts has impacted not only those directly engaged in academic contexts but also those rocked by its rippling effects. The stakes placed on successful or effective engagement with English in academic contexts are considerable (e.g. consider the case of students who uproot their families for temporary home and schooling for the duration of university studies), and the role of EAP in achieving effective involvement and participation in university life cannot be underestimated and undervalued. So, how can CL help? We discuss in detail what a corpus perspective brings to EAP in Chapter 4. However, at its most fundamental, the empirical focus of CL helps EAP unpack and make transparent the general and the discipline-specific linguistic ways of communicating knowledge and claiming membership without having to rely on the vagaries of generic feedback.

The present book fills a gap in the existing literature by exploring the CL-EAP interface from different types of academic discourses – namely, spoken, written and computer-mediated discourse. Despite the impact that CL has had on EAP, there is a dearth of publications like the present one. The closest book is Bowker and Pearson (2002), which focuses on specialized language and was written at the start of the 21st century. In a fast-pacing field such as CL, it is understandable that the practices have changed and evolved since then.

With a view to ensuring the accessibility of the book, we do not assume any prior knowledge or work with CL. Throughout the book, we present evidence-based examples of what CL can tell us about EAP, we explain how you can undertake your CL analyses autonomously, and we foster your reflection on how the empirical evidence brought about by these analyses can inform EAP decisions. Drawing on freely available corpora and software, we demonstrate how CL tools and techniques can be used in the investigation of academic discourses to address problems and challenges in EAP learning, teaching and research. We also provide guidance on how to approach the construction of specialized academic corpora and how to apply such knowledge to specific tasks of relevance to your practice.

Researchers have known about the benefits of CL in language learning and teaching for quite some time. Although there are a limited number of books on this topic which speak directly to a wide-ranging audience (e.g. O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter, 2007; Timmis, 2015), research conclusions do not always connect with students, practitioners and other educational stakeholders. Unusually, despite CL having had more influence in EAP than in other types of English, there are few publications in this interface focused on how to go about using CL for EAP. One notable exception is Karpenko-Seccombe’s (2021) resource book aimed at those wishing to improve their or their students’ writing skills in English.

For us, using CL in EAP has the potential to bridge some of the divides which continually reproduce the notion of theory and practice as dichotomous. It is not our intention to offer ready-made classroom instruction nor prescribed language standards, but rather to show how tools and techniques of CL can be used by the EAP community as one way to enable better evidence and understanding of particular academic discourse communities. What happens with this knowledge and experience thereafter must become entangled with the reflexive and critical practices of those who choose to do something with it at a particular moment in space and time. We can draw upon the evidence base afforded by corpora to gain access to gate-kept opportunities, to challenge dogma, to correct myths and fallacies, to enable and/or to empower. On the other hand, of course, it can be used to restrict and enforce a certain kind of conformity. That multiple perspectives are possible is not an extreme relativist position neither is it deterministic; it is a reminder that languages do not exist on their own. We, users of languages, employ those languages to achieve particular actions as we interact with/in the world.

It does not take long (or rather, it really should not take long) to recognize that there is no such thing as ‘the English Language’ (Makoni & Pennycook, 2006). We observe varieties of English often named after their socio-historical geolocation of use (e.g. Nigerian English, American English, Glaswegian English), and there are Englishes that are named after their use (e.g. English as a first, second, foreign language, and English as a lingua franca).

When we leave behind innatism (i.e. the position which sits in opposition to empiricism and claims that we are born with pre-existing ideas and principles), contemporary linguistics evidences the collective usage-based nature of languages. Our language use varies in the many different contexts in which we use it – e.g. talking with family, getting a haircut, seeking our rights, writing a will; and, in academic contexts, writing an essay, preparing for a seminar, giving a lecture. Understanding how language use varies with context has been made possible through linguistic evidence empirically gathered from those activities. The empirical gathering and subsequent computer-assisted analysis of instances of language use is what CL is about at its essence. Therefore, if we want to know about language use in a particular context, we can study the data evidencing how people use language in that context – be it in a casual conversation, in a newspaper, or in a university.

Academic spaces (e.g. universities, educational institutions, academic publishing) are highly institutionalized, routinized and gate-kept. On the one hand, the intention to describe something as ‘academic’ seeks to engage notions of studies, thoughts, schools, subjects, universities and cleverness – all broadly considered ‘good’ things. On the other hand, ‘academic’ is used in phrases to signal not only hypothetical notions, but also those which might not have a direct relation to practical issues felt in real life (hence, for example, the push for the impact or the application of academic studies in the UK and in several other national contexts). As the examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008-) in Figures 1.2 and 1.3 illustrate, no matter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• List of appendices
• 1 Introduction
• 2 EAP in its contexts
• 3 CL for the EAP community
• 4 EAP and CL (non-)interfaces
• 5 Specialized corpus compilation for EAP
• 6 Corpus analysis for EAP
• 7 Corpus research on spoken academic discourse
• 8 Corpus research on written academic discourse
• 9 Corpus research on computer-mediated academic discourse
• 10 Conclusion
• APPENDICES
• Index