EFL Learners’ Writing styles via Corpus Driven Approach

EFL Learners’ Writing styles
via Corpus Driven Approach
Rinda Warawudhi & Wipa Praditwiengkham
Burapha University, THAILAND
The 6th ICLEHI, 22-23 April 2017,
Singapore

Writing Courses
Literature Track Business English Track
English Writing Skills English Writing Skills
Paragraph Writing
English Writing for Business
Communication
Essay Writing
Business Note Taking and
Summarizing
Summary Writing
Business Conversation and
Negotiation
Project Writing in English Project Writing in Business
4
Singapore

Project Writing – Course Description
• This course guides students through the
process of developing and writing a project.
• Course topics include idea organization and
development, word choice, advanced
grammar, writing convention for project
development and writing.
• As a result, students are required to produce
an English writing work in accordance with the
learner’s interest under the guidance of the
lecturer.
5
Singapore

6
Singapore

Why did this project?
• For University - curriculum
• For students
• For English teachers
7
Singapore

Objectives of the Study
• To study EFL learners’ writing style
• To discover how writing styles of Thai learners
(NNS) differ from native-speaker learns (NS)
8
How do Thai EFL learners'
writing style differ from native
speaker learners?
Research
Question
Singapore

Methodology
9
BUU corpus
• 19 writing projects
from 4th year English
major students in
Burapha University,
Chon Buri
• 60,805 words
BAWE corpus
• British Academic
Written English
• 2,761 pieces (500-
5,000 words)
• by the universities of
Warwick, Reading and
Oxford Brookes.
• Available at
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
AntConc
• By Laurence Anthony
(2005 & 2016)
• Version 3.4.4w
• Log-Likelihood ratio
A corpus driven approach
Singapore

Why corpus analysis?
• focuses on a range of features that NNS
differ from NSNS vs NNS
• highlights on the differentiation between
speakers from different mother tongue
backgrounds
NNS vs NNS
• explain the phenomenon of the outstanding
linguistic features of target corpus
NS vs NNS vs
NNS ???
10
Granger (2002)

Literature Review
Author (s) Corpora Features
Mo (2015) LOCNESS vs Chinese
learners
Connectives
Ersanli (2015) BAWE vs Turkish univ.
students
Cohesive devices
Hao-Jan Chen,
et al (2015)
NS journals vs Taiwanese
MA thesis vs NS MA
thesis
Phrasal verbs
Paquot et al
(2013)
ICLE vs VESPA,
LOCNESS vs BAWE
Writer/reader
visibility
Leedham and
Cai (2013)
BAWE vs Chinese
learners vs ELT teaching
material
Linking adverbials
11

Corpus Driven Approach
12
Positive keyness Negative keyness
Overuse words Underuse words
Singapore

13
Findings
Positive keyness Negative keyness
1. words for subjects
2. "got" instead of "obtain"
3. buy, buyer, buyers, buying
and bought
4. "who" relative clauses
1. hedges (may, would) and
attitude markers (should,
must)
2. contrastive linking words
(however, although, and
whilst)
3. "its”
Singapore

Positive Keyness
14

• "...In addition, with reference to the answer of
the participants in an interview, there was
unexpected answer. Some of the participants
felt out of control themselves when they had
to talk with the foreigners. Even the
participants studied in English major,
sometime they felt lack confident and excited
to communicate with the foreigners..."
(buu05.txt)
15
Positive Keyness
Singapore

16
Positive Keyness
2) "got" instead of "obtain"

Rank Frequency Keyness Keywords
57 63 226.425 buy
99 36 148.731 buyers
101 41 145.740 buying
122 27 117.420 buyer
137 31 108.616 bought
329 29 61.605 purchase
408 16 28.976 purchasing
456 6 26.240 purchasers
18
Positive Keyness
3. buy, buyer, buyers, buying and bought
Lemma Word Forms of "buy" and "purchase" in BUU Corpus
Singapore

19
Positive Keyness
4. "who" relative clauses
Other relative clauses with other words e.g. where, when,
or which were not included in the top 500 positive
keywords.
Singapore

17 43 54.137 may
19 68 52.947 would
29 29 40.123 should
55 17 27.432 must
20
Negative Keyness
1. hedges (may, would) and attitude markers (should, must)
Singapore

18 51 53.410 however
39 13 32.779 although
29 1 27.545 Whilst
257 54
56.179
(positive)
addition
21
Negative Keyness
2. contrastive linking words (however, although, and whilst)
Singapore

22
Singapore

BUU corpus BAWE corpus
Hits Keyness
Found
plots
Hits Found plots
its 17
-138.061 9
(47.36%)
11,933
2,146
(79.01%)
their 389
+154.904 19
(100%)
19,073
2,375
(87.44%)
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Negative Keyness
3. "its”
Singapore

Discussion & Conclusion
1. more "plural" than
"singular"
2. more personal and less
academic
3. higher density but lesser
variety
24
Singapore

Review of syllabi and
Discussion with writing teachers
• students have been informed to use variety of
word choices and sentence patterns
• not written in grading criteria for these actions
• students then preferred to use words or
patterns that they were very certain for
accuracy
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Singapore

Why did this project?
• For University - curriculum
• For students
• For English teachers
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Singapore

Limitations
• The study cannot represent Thai learners’
writing styles
• Small groups of corpus might not represent
English major undergraduates in Burapha
University
• Reference corpus should be equivalent to the
study corpus
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Singapore

Further studies
• The use of extra exercise reflecting the writing
behaviors for these learners to judge their
perceptions toward their writing style
• Longitudinal studies to observe their
development of writing performance along
these five writing courses
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Singapore

EFL Learners’ Writing styles via Corpus Driven Approach

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