No title

A Taste for Corpora

Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL) SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline.

General Editor

Consulting Editor

Elena Tognini-Bonelli

Wolfgang Teubert

The Tuscan Word Centre/ The University of Siena

University of Birmingham

Advisory Board Michael Barlow

Graeme Kennedy

Douglas Biber

Geoffrey N. Leech

Marina Bondi

Michaela Mahlberg

Christopher S. Butler

Anna Mauranen

Sylviane Granger

Ute Römer

M.A.K. Halliday

Jan Svartvik

Yang Huizhong

John M. Swales

Susan Hunston

Martin Warren

University of Auckland Northern Arizona University University of Modena and Reggio Emilia University of Wales, Swansea University of Louvain University of Sydney Jiao Tong University, Shanghai University of Birmingham

Victoria University of Wellington University of Lancaster University of Nottingham University of Helsinki University of Michigan University of Lund University of Michigan The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Volume 45 A Taste for Corpora. In honour of Sylviane Granger Edited by Fanny Meunier, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Magali Paquot

A Taste for Corpora In honour of Sylviane Granger Edited by

Fanny Meunier Sylvie De Cock Gaëtanelle Gilquin Magali Paquot Université catholique de Louvain

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Cover design: Françoise Berserik Cover illustration from original painting Random Order by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Taste for Corpora : In honour of Sylviane Granger / Edited by Fanny Meunier, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Magali Paquot. p. cm. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, issn 1388-0373 ; v. 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Corpora (Linguistics) 2.  Language and languages--Computer-assisted instruction. 3.  Second language acquisition--Computer-assisted instruction.  I. Meunier, Fanny. II. Granger, Sylviane, 1951P128.C68.T37 2011 410.1’88--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 0350 2 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8708 3 (Eb)

2011008291

© 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

To Sylviane Granger, once our professor, always our mentor, now our colleague and dear friend

Table of contents Acknowledgements List of contributors Preface Bengt Altenberg

ix xi xiii

Putting corpora to good uses: A guided tour Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot

1

Frequency, corpora and language learning Geoffrey Leech

7

Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson†

33

The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce

63

Revisiting apprentice texts: Using lexical bundles to investigate expert and apprentice performances in academic writing Christopher Tribble

85

Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora Paul Rayson and Alistair Baron

109

Data mining with learner corpora: Choosing classifiers for L1 detection Scott Jarvis

127

Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? Anna Mauranen

155

Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs: A corpus-informed study Norbert Schmitt and Stephen Redwood

173

 A Taste for Corpora

Corpora and the new Englishes: Using the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ to explore research perspectives for the future Christian Mair

209

Towards a new generation of Corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning David Wible and Nai-Lung Tsao

237

Automating the creation of dictionaries: Where will it all end? Michael Rundell and Adam Kilgarriff

257

 ddendum A Select list of publications by Sylviane Granger

283

Subject index Name index

289 293

Acknowledgements We would first of all like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm, their diligence in keeping to deadlines, and their patience in complying with our editorial demands, one of which being secrecy for quite a while! We would also like to express our most sincere gratitude to Elena Tognini-Bonelli, editor of the Studies in Corpus Linguistics series, and to Kees Vaes and his team at Benjamins for their much appreciated trust and support. Last but not least, we would like to thank Sylviane for not finding out about our secret project and meetings before all was (officially) revealed to her!

List of contributors Bengt Altenberg

Lund University, Sweden

Alistair Baron

Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Caroline Bunce

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Sylvie De Cock

University of Louvain, Belgium

Gaëtanelle Gilquin

University of Louvain, Belgium

Hilde Hasselgård

University of Oslo, Norway

Scott Jarvis

Ohio University, United States of America

Stig Johansson†

University of Oslo, Norway

Adam Kilgarriff

Lexical Computing Ltd., Brighton, United Kingdom

Geoffrey Leech

Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Christian Mair

University of Freiburg, Germany

Anna Mauranen

University of Helsinki, Finland

Fanny Meunier

University of Louvain, Belgium

JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain Magali Paquot

University of Louvain, Belgium

Paul Rayson

Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Stephen Redwood

University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Michael Rundell

 exicography MasterClass and Macmillan Dictionaries, L United Kingdom

Norbert Schmitt

University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Christopher Tribble

London University, United Kingdom

Nai-Lung Tsao

National Central University, Taiwan

David Wible

National Central University, Taiwan

Preface Bengt Altenberg

The digital revolution has had a profound effect on contemporary life. It has changed our way of communicating with each other and our ways of gathering and processing information. In linguistics the change has also been dramatic. It has made it possible to develop models for simulating language behaviour and practical applications in human-machine interaction and to create tools for storing, processing and analysing large amounts of text. The development of computer corpus linguistics is now familiar to most scholars interested in the study of language. The fact that we can analyse large corpora of various kinds has provided a solid empirical basis for the description of language and language use. Although corpus linguistics is strictly speaking a methodology rather than a theory of language, it has opened up new approaches to the study of language and new and fruitful ways of matching theory and data. Today we tend to take this development for granted. But it is profitable to remember that carefully compiled computer corpora and tools for exploring them did not arise ‘out of the blue’. They were – and are – the laborious achievement of inspired linguists who understood the potential of the new technology and knew how to use it for linguistic purposes. Computer corpus linguistics has had several pioneers of this kind since its beginning in the 1960s. This book is a tribute to one of these pioneers: Sylviane Granger, professor of English at the University of Louvain, Belgium. Sylviane Granger began her career the hard way, in what has humorously been called the era BC (‘Before Computers’) when corpus data were stored on cards in shoeboxes or filing cabinets. Her Ph.D. thesis on the use of the passive in spoken English (published in 1983) was the result of a painstaking manual inventory and analysis of be + past participle forms in the files of the Survey of English Usage (then not yet available in computerized form) at University College, London. That experience undoubtedly trained her in handling and analysing a large amount of corpus data but it also, one can imagine, made her appreciate the advantages offered by computerized corpora which were being developed at the time. But Sylviane Granger also had another fervent interest. Being tri-lingual in French, English and Dutch, she was deeply concerned with second language learning and teaching, notably the learning and teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) and

 A Taste for Corpora

– almost as a logical consequence – in contrastive analysis. These interests can be seen as the main driving forces behind the research conducted at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) which she founded at Louvain-la-Neuve in 1990. Since then, her wide-ranging interests in English corpus linguistics, her ambition to use the results for pedagogical purposes, and her enthusiasm as a teacher and project leader has made the CECL a veritable hothouse of corpus research and development which has inspired a large number of scholars around the world and fostered a new generation of enthusiastic co-workers at Louvain-la-Neuve and abroad. The research activities at the CECL have undergone a remarkable expansion since its beginning 20 years ago. Broadly speaking, the development has focused on four related areas: – The creation and analysis of computer corpora of various kinds: learner corpora, multilingual corpora, corpora of English for Specific Purposes, etc. – Linguistic research on these corpora ranging from lexis and phraseology to grammar and discourse with special emphasis on the development of corpus-related methodologies and on matching empirical data and linguistic theories – Pedagogical applications, for example in learner-oriented lexicography, textbooks, web-based dictionaries, proficiency testing, etc. – The development and use of computer-aided tools in research and pedagogical applications The work in these areas has expanded organically in a series of related steps, each serving to supplement or refine the results of the previous one. For instance, the first corpus initiated by Sylviane Granger was the widely successful International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), a computerized corpus of written argumentative essays produced by advanced learners of English with a number of different mother tongues. This written corpus was soon supplemented with a spoken counterpart (LINDSEI) consisting of interviews of intermediate to advanced EFL learners. However, both these corpora offered a cross-sectional view of the learners’ interlanguage. To redress this limitation a new longitudinal learner corpus project (LONGDALE) has recently been launched, again involving advanced learners with different mother tongues but followed over a period of three years. Another example of the expansion of the work at CECL is the development of cross-linguistic research. The learner corpora give evidence of errors as well as quantitative deviations – overuse or underuse – from a (selected) native English norm or standard of comparison. These errors and deviations tend to differ in type and frequency depending on the L1 of the learners. One natural question that arises is to what extent L1 interference (transfer) plays a role in the learners’ production. This question encourages a contrastive perspective and the development of multilingual (comparable or translation) corpora which can provide empirical evidence for testing claims in second language acquisition theory which have previously mainly been based on intuition.



Preface 

However, interlanguage phenomena like underuse or overuse of a target language feature may also be the result of overgeneralization of a target language structure or, alternatively, reflect special characteristics of the selected native English norm. The choice of target norm is therefore problematic. Which variety (or varieties) of English should be the target in second language research and teaching? Should all learners have the same target? Questions like these inevitably lead to a concern with language variation and the characteristics of different varieties of English. The result has been a development of learner corpora and multilingual corpora representing English for Specific Purposes (such as newspaper editorials, business English, academic English, law, etc.). Another recent interest at the CECL is to compare learner English with indigenized varieties of English (‘World Englishes’). All these perspectives require special methodologies and the use of various computer-aided tools for marking, analysing and presenting the data and for the creation of pedagogical applications of various kinds (e.g. learner-oriented dictionaries, textbooks, multilingual term banks). For example, in order to compare learner data with native data (L2 vs. L1) or different kinds of learner data (L2 vs. L2) Sylviane Granger developed the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) methodology which has been a fruitful approach in many ICLE studies. In addition, to integrate the CIA method with contrastive observations from multilingual corpora, she developed the Integrated Contrastive Model which helps the researcher to predict or explain various deviant interlanguage phenomena. Examples of computer-aided tools developed by the team at the CECL are the error-tagging system designed for the ICLE corpus and various learner-oriented projects in electronic lexicography, such as the creation of a web-based phraseological dictionary of English for Academic Purposes intended for non-native writers and of a trilingual terminological database of university-related terms (English-French-Dutch). This short survey of the work carried out at the CECL can only give an indication of the varied and rapidly expanding activities initiated by Sylviane Granger (for details, see the CECL homepage at www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl.html). Apart from her central influence as an enthusiastic organizer and creative researcher, she has inspired a large number of scholars around the world and created fruitful international cooperation around her projects. The collection of articles presented here on the occasion of her 60th birthday give a good indication of her wide research interests. They illustrate the variety of topics and approaches that characterize the field as well as new lines of development. In presenting this collection the editors and contributors wish to join her colleagues and friends around the world in celebrating her pioneering achievement, hoping that her enthusiasm and creativity will continue to inspire us in the years to come.

Putting corpora to good uses A guided tour Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot

This volume is a tribute to Professor Sylviane Granger, and a special gift for her 60th birthday. The eleven chapters it is made up of tackle corpora from a wide range of perspectives, thus reflecting Sylviane’s insatiable taste for corpora and her many interests. They were written by distinguished scholars whose work is appreciated by Sylviane, but who are also (long-standing) friends of hers. The different contributions aim to shed light on the numerous linguistic and pedagogical uses to which corpora can be put. They present cutting-edge research in the authors’ respective domain of expertise and suggest directions for the future. Given the many potential uses of corpora, the volume is inevitably incomplete and limited in size and focus, but we nevertheless believe that it will offer readers an informed account of the important role that corpora play in applied linguistics today. In this chapter, we will first guide readers through the main paths that Sylviane has explored in her career so far, and then provide an overview of the articles that are brought together in this volume. Sylviane Granger is a corpus linguist, a specialist in contrastive linguistics, a lexicographer, and also an English as a Foreign Language teacher. She is a polymathic applied linguist and her impressive list of publications (see Addendum, this volume) reflects her numerous research interests including corpus linguistics (native, learner and bilingual corpora), phraseology, lexicography, English as a Foreign Language, English for Academic Purposes, Second Language Acquisition, contrastive linguistics and technology-enhanced language learning. Twenty years ago, Sylviane founded the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium. From a modest start in 1990, with one table, one chair, one computer, one bookcase and one researcher, the centre has gradually grown to include many more tables and computers, but above all many more researchers. To date some twenty researchers have been directly involved in the work done at the CECL, a worldwide renowned research centre. This exponential growth is the result of Sylviane’s enthusiasm, work, vision and leadership. Sylviane has always been an

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Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot

enthusiastic project and team leader. In addition she has always put a lot of energy and efforts into promoting learner corpus research through her publications, the many talks she has given all over the world, but also via the (co-)organization of Summer/Easter schools and international conferences in Louvain-la-Neuve. Recent conferences include Phraseology 2005: The Many Faces of Phraseology, and eLexicography in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Applications (2009). Today, the CECL is busy organizing the Learner Corpus Research 2011 conference to mark the 20th anniversary of its creation. Sylviane has been one of the main driving forces behind learner corpus research and she initiated two pioneering projects in the field: the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, Granger et al. 2009) and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI, Gilquin et al. 2010). The ICLE project started in 1990 and the second version of ICLE, released in 2009, contains data from 16 mother tongue backgrounds, for a total of 3.3 million words. As for LINDSEI, whose first version has recently been released, it was started in 1995 and to date contains about 800,000 words produced by learners from 11 different mother tongue backgrounds. Methodological issues have also been a major concern for Sylviane and, in 1996, she proposed the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) (Granger 1996) approach to analyze learner corpora. The advent of learner corpus research can be said to have taken place with the publication of Learner English on Computer (Granger 1998), a collection of pioneering papers on learner language, largely based on ICLE, which has inspired many publications in learner corpus research. The volume Sylviane co-edited in 2002, entitled Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching, (Granger et al. 2002) provides a follow-up with further developments in the field. At the time of writing, Sylviane’s research appetite and enthusiasm remain undiminished and her head is full of new ideas and exciting projects! She often says that none of this would have been possible without her team at the CECL, and this is probably true. But what would a team be without an inspirational team leader who always looks on the bright corpus side of life? With this book, we explicitly want to thank her for her catching enthusiasm, her intellectual perceptiveness, her unfailing expert guidance, her sparkling personality, but also for her friendship and for the time she spends with us, be it to discuss academic or more personal everyday life matters, or even to party and have a good laugh. As highlighted at the beginning of this introduction, the different contributions included in the book reflect the numerous linguistic and pedagogical uses to which corpora can be put. The first two chapters address two central issues in corpus research: the notion of frequency and the role of contrastive analysis. In Chapter 1, Leech examines the role of frequency, as established on the basis of corpus evidence, in language learning. He shows that after early word-frequency lists such as West’s General Service List, followed by a generative period characterised by rejection of frequency, the advent of electronic corpora has led to renewed interest in frequency (frequency of words, but also of collocations, constructions, etc). This movement is supported by recent trends in linguistics such as the development of usage-based theories or the recognition of



Putting corpora to good uses

frequency effects in grammaticalisation. Leech claims that frequency, though not the only relevant factor, is important for language teaching, because of the principle of ‘more frequent = more important to learn’, according to which the most frequent words are the more useful ones to the learner (for comprehension as well as production purposes). The chapter finishes with some words of caution (what is most frequent does not necessarily correspond to what is most salient, and corpora from which frequencies are extracted do not always match learners’ needs) and some words of comfort (ordinal frequencies, i.e. how words are ordered along a frequency list, are normally sufficient, and these are usually quite similar across corpora). In the second chapter, Hasselgård and Johansson† start their paper with a select review of pre-corpus interlanguage studies, focusing on three Scandinavian research projects, before moving on to the development of computerized learner corpora. They focus on the ICLE project and on CIA, and present a number of valuable insights into advanced learner English that were gained from using comparable corpora and a common model of analysis. They then introduce another framework developed by S. Granger, viz. the Integrated Contrastive Model (ICM), which makes it possible to explain and/or predict mother-tongue (L1)specific learner problems on the basis of systematic comparisons of the first language and the target language. The two research models are illustrated by means of three case studies. The first two studies adopt CIA to investigate the use of quite and I would say in four ICLE sub-corpora and the third one uses the ICM to analyse seem in the interlanguage of Norwegian learners. After identifying a number of challenges that learner corpus research needs to meet, Hasselgård and Johansson conclude by praising the dynamism and enthusiasm that characterise this relatively new field. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the development of academic literacies. Neff van Aertselaer and Bunce do so by examining the use of reporting verbs and evaluative lexical resources in two small corpora of texts written within the framework of an academic writing (AW) course by EFL Spanish university students at B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference. The Academic Writing (AW) course was organised around a series of can do descriptors to make explicit the required structural and rhetorical features to be learned. The authors compare their results with the ICLE Spanish sub-corpus and show that, by providing explicit descriptors for argumentative writing, the syllabus for the two AW courses did actually support students’ literacy growth. This is also confirmed by a comparison of the AW texts written at the beginning and end of the academic writing course. The study also illustrates how learner corpus data can be used to evaluate the syllabus and modify classroom teaching practices. In Chapter 4, Tribble investigates expert and apprentice performances in academic writing, drawing on Biber’s (2006) account of lexical bundles. He compares lexical bundles in a corpus of apprentice written production (KCL Apprentice Writing Corpus) and a close analogue corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE), an exemplar corpus (Applied Linguistics Corpus) and two progressively more distant analogue corpora (BNC Baby, Academic and Acta Tropica). The chapter provides concrete illustrations of how the written production of postgraduate students in a single disciplinary area can be

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Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot

used to trace contrasts between apprentice and expert writing, and how the account of such contrasts can be exploited in materials development for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing courses. Tribble’s study demonstrates how corpus analysis can help meet the learners’ linguistic needs; it also shows that a focus on lexical bundles fosters a better understanding of apprentice writers’ strategies. Issues pertaining to the automatic analysis of learner corpora are addressed in Chapters 5 and 6. In Chapter 5, Rayson and Baron present the novel application of a hybrid approach to the detection of spelling errors in learner data. They use a modified version of the Variant Detector (VARD) software, initially developed to match historical spelling variants to modern equivalents, to detect spelling errors in ICLE sub-corpora consisting of 50,000 words from three different mother tongue backgrounds (French, German and Spanish). They show the potential of natural language processing methods to contribute to the automatic error analysis of learner corpora as VARD can both assist a manual editing process of a sample corpus and be trained and run automatically to generate larger amounts of data for analysis. The authors explain, however, that despite the very high precision rate obtained by VARD, further research is still needed to improve the recall rate of detection of learner errors, especially those that can only be found using contextual patterns. In the next chapter, Jarvis uses datamining techniques to automatically detect the L1 of learners. The influence of the first language on a second has been one of the most researched topics in learner corpus studies. Most of these studies have used CIA to identify features of non-nativeness in learner productions and assess whether these features are peculiar to one language group, and thus possibly due to the influence of the learners’ mother tongues. In a number of recent publications, however, Jarvis has put forward the detection-based approach to cross-linguistic influence, a complementary and largely automatic approach to detect cross-linguistic influence. The author compares 20 learning algorithms used for supervised classification, i.e. classifiers, and assesses their ability to learn to detect L1-related patterns of use of n-grams in 12 ICLE sub-corpora. He also explains that the applications of the detection-based approach to cross-linguistic influence are tremendous and largely transcend the field of language learning and teaching, as they could for instance be used for intelligence purposes. Chapters 7 to 9 deal with the sometimes blurred frontiers between second/foreign language acquisition, second language use and new varieties of English. Mauranen compares learner corpora, which contain data produced by second/foreign language learners, and corpora of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), which contain data produced by non-native speakers who use English as a contact language. She first highlights the differences between the two, making a distinction between second language acquisition and second language use, and showing how this distinction, and the social, cognitive and interactive differences it implies, may impact corpus compilation and interpretation. While the division according to mother tongue background makes sense in learner corpora, for example, it is much less relevant (and feasible) in ELF corpora, which usually incorporate unpredictable combinations of mother tongues. On the other hand, learners and ELF users are also shown to share certain features that can be seen



Putting corpora to good uses

to reflect the cognitive processes underlying the production of (non-native) language. The processes of overgeneralisation and simplification, for instance, are important in both second language acquisition and second language use, and can result in similar lexicogrammatical or phraseological features, as exemplified by Mauranen. On the basis of these similarities and differences, the author argues that learner corpora and ELF corpora should be kept separate, but are of great mutual interest. In Chapter 8, Schmitt and Redwood analyze 68 second language learners’ productive and receptive knowledge of some of the most common phrasal verbs in English with the help of productive and receptive tests. In addition to frequency effects, the authors also address the potential link between mode (spoken vs. written) and phrasal verb knowledge, as well as the interactions of other factors that can lead to individual differences in the acquisition of phrasal verbs (second/foreign language proficiency, gender, age, and amount and type of exposure to the target language inside and outside the classroom). The authors demonstrate that frequency can predict phrasal knowledge to a considerable degree in terms of productive mastery, but not in terms of receptive mastery. Whilst their results show no effect for formal-instruction-based variables, they show that more out-of-class exposure facilitates the learning of phrasal verbs. In the next chapter, Mair shows how corpus linguistics has contributed to the study of the so-called ‘New Englishes’. His own research focus is on Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole, which he explores on the basis of a large corpus of diasporic Jamaican web-posts, called the Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican. Mair highlights interesting features of Jamaican English and Creole as it is used in computer-mediated communication, for example the higher frequency of basilectal variants in cyber-Jamaican than in face-to-face interaction, which he explains by the phenomenon of ‘anti-formality’, i.e. “conscious closing of social distance”. He also deals with lexical borrowings from African languages in Jamaican English and Creole, with words such as mzungu (‘white person’ in Kiswahili) or wahala (‘trouble/problem’ in Nigerian Pidgin) being found in the Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican. More generally, the paper underlines the benefits of relying on data derived from the World Wide Web, which includes more non-standard forms than corpora of face-to-face interaction, in order to investigate variation in the New Englishes. It also argues that web-forums can provide an arena for language contact that would be unlikely to occur in the real world, resulting in the rapid globalisation of certain vernacular features. The last two chapters of the book are devoted to the role that corpora can play in the development of lexical and lexicographical resources for language learning. Wible and Tsao report on a new corpus-derived lexical resource designed to help bridge the gap between language learners’ needs and what corpora can offer when it comes to vocabulary learning. After arguing that vocabulary knowledge is best seen as a rich network of interconnections among words and that corpora as collections of texts and tokens fail to give language learners direct access to this web of interconnections, the chapter describes the lexical knowledgebase StringNet, which has been specifically created to reflect what learners need to master. The authors explain how corpus-derived ‘hybrid n-grams’, in which part-of-speech categories can occur alongside lexemes or word forms, have been instrumental in automatically discovering not only patterns of word behaviour but also

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Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot

the relations among these patterns and words. In addition, they show how hybrid ngrams make it possible to uncover the larger patterns in which collocations often tend to be embedded. Finally, Wible and Tsao suggest that language learners could be given access to the lexical knowledgebase StringNet via a browser-based tool which could help them discover patterns they had not thought of looking for. As for Rundell and Kilgarriff, they examine and evaluate the role of computers and automation in modern dictionary making and more specifically in the period from the late 1990s onwards. The focus is on a number of lexicographic tasks that have been or are in the process of being automated to a significant degree. These include the compilation of lexicographic corpora (with the advent of the ‘web corpus’), the development of headword lists (e.g. selecting headwords, identifying multiwords or new words), the identification of the key linguistic features of the lexical units included in the dictionary (e.g. their collocational/colligational preferences, the grammatical or register labels they should be assigned), and the selection of examples to be included (e.g. using the GDEX [‘good dictionary examples’] algorithm). The contribution and development of word sketches and the Sketch Engine are also highlighted and amply illustrated. Throughout the chapter the authors show how automation has made it possible not only to relieve lexicographers of more tedious work involved in dictionary making but also to increase consistency and reliability when describing language and compiling dictionary entries. Their paper is rounded off by a discussion of possible further developments of the process of automation in lexicography. We hope that the guided tour of some of the key approaches, methods and domains of applications of (learner) corpus research provided in this volume will help readers refine and/or develop their own taste for corpora, and that it will prompt them to discover and freely explore new paths.

References Biber, D. 2006. University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 23]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (eds). 2010. The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Granger, S. 1996. From CA to CIA and back: An integrated approach to computerized bilingual and learner corpora. In Languages in Contrast. Text-based Cross-linguistic Studies [Lund Studies in English 88], K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg & M. Johansson (eds), 37–51. Lund: Lund University Press. Granger, S. (ed.). 1998. Learner English on Computer. London: Addison Wesley Longman. Granger, S., Dagneaux, E., Meunier, F. & Paquot, M. (eds). 2009. The International Corpus of Learner English. Handbook and CD-ROM. Version 2. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Granger, S., Petch-Tyson, S. & Hung J. (eds). 2002. Computer learner corpora, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Frequency, corpora and language learning Geoffrey Leech I begin this chapter with a brief survey of how frequency – in particular, frequency of words – had a role in language learning in the days before electronic corpora existed. Then I consider how the ‘corpus revolution’ made frequency information available in a totally unprecedented way from the 1960s onward. But how far is this useful to the language learner and teacher? Is the right kind of frequency knowledge being captured? In the second half of this chapter, I will consider the equation ‘more frequent = more important to learn’, what questions of frequency we really need to ask, and how far they can be answered in the present state of corpus linguistics.1

1. Introduction If asked what is the one benefit that corpora can provide and that cannot be provided by other means, I would reply ‘information about frequency’. Frequency is also a theme which has recurred in language learning – although it has also suffered from neglect (as will be briefly explained below). Hence there is need for a re-appraisal of the links between frequency, corpora and language learning. Following this introduction, the chapter is divided into four main sections: Section 2: ‘A brief glance at history’; Section 3: ‘Recent progress in frequency studies relevant to language learning’; Section 4: ‘New directions in applied linguistics favourable to frequency’; Section 5: ‘Challenges and possible solutions’.The chapter ends with some concluding remarks (Section 6). To begin with, it is as well to make clear that there are three usages of frequency that might be confused. a. ‘Raw frequency’ is simply a count of how many instances of some linguistic phenomenon X occur in some corpus, text or collection of texts. b. ‘Normalized frequency’ (sometimes called ‘relative frequency’) expresses frequency relative to a standard yardstick (e.g. ‘tokens per million words’).

1. I am very grateful to the editors, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Fanny Meunier and Magali Paquot, for their valuable suggestions and support in helping me to improve this chapter.

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Geoffrey Leech

c. In what I will call ‘ordinal frequency’, the frequency of X is compared with the frequencies of Y, of Z, etc. Thus a rank frequency list, in which words are listed in order of frequency, is the classic example of ordinal frequency. Although (a) is the raw measure from which (b) and (c) are derived, it is of little or no use in itself. Normalized frequency (b) is of course essential if we are to make comparisons between corpora, texts, etc., of different sizes. But my view is that ordinal frequency (c) is the most useful measure to use when we are considering language learning. It is of no use for the language teacher to be told that shall occurs 175 times per million words in a corpus. But to be told that will is much (15 times) more frequent than shall may well be pedagogically useful.

2. A brief glance at history The historical sketch I am about to give roughly divides into three epochs: (a) early frequency studies; (b) the rejection of frequency; (c) the computer age and the revival of frequency studies.

2.1

Early frequency studies

The early chapters of introductions to corpus linguistics by Kennedy (1998) and by McEnery & Wilson (2001) give something of the background to this. But for my present purpose, it is enough to refer to one or two landmarks in the provision of wordfrequency information on English. Thorndike (1921, 1932), Thorndike & Lorge (1944), and West (1953)2 are noted examples of word-frequency lists produced by counting and calculating word frequencies by hand in the first half of the twentieth century – before, that is, the development of computers. By present-day standards, the corpora used were pitifully small, and the selection of texts they contained included some choices hardly ideal for learners of the current language. For example, Thorndike (1921, 1932) made use of a corpus containing such classics from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as Dryden’s Dramatic Essays, the American Declaration of Independence, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. However, the important point here is that word frequency was taken seriously as a guide for language teaching in those days, and in spite of the enormous amount of unrewarding ‘slave labour’ involved, building frequency lists was felt to be a worthwhile exercise. The simple postulate justifying this effort was: ‘more frequent = more important to learn’. Of greater interest from the theoretical point of view was the mathematical work of Zipf. Zipf ’s Law (1935, 1949) held that the frequency of any word is inversely 2. West’s book was called A General Service List of English Words, and recorded frequencies of senses, not just words. Although not published until 1953, West’s book was based on counts laboriously undertaken in the decades before 1950.



Frequency, corpora and language learning

100% Top 3000 words – 86% of the language % total words in the LCN Top 100 words – 50% of the language

Top 10 words – 25% of the language* the, be, of, and, a, to, in, have, it, I

concession

erode

consolation

stylistic

consumption

90% 80%

aspiration

overwhelm

carefully

viable

therapeutic

mingle

unique

70%

fresh

60%

deep

50%

very

40%

good

30%

up

20%

year

10% 1

1000

2000 3000

4000

5000

6000

7000

8000

9000

10000

Figure 1.╇ Frequency graph of the 10,000 most frequent words in the Longman Corpus Network (Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited from: Stephen Bullon and Geoffrey Leech, ‘Longman Communication 3000 and the Longman Defining Vocabulary’. In Longman Communication 3000. 1. Harlow, Essex: Pearson/Longman.)

proportional to its rank in the frequency list, such that the nth word has a frequency of approximately 1/n X the frequency of the word of highest rank. Zipf ’s Law gave a more heavily weighted importance to the most frequent words than would be expected according to normal distribution. Language is such that the most frequent 50 words (i.e. word-types) account for 40% of word-tokens in a corpus of texts; the most frequent 3,000 words account for 85% of word-tokens; and the most frequent 10,000 words account for 92% of word-tokens (see Figure 1). Carroll’s (1971) mathematicallyinduced estimate of the number of word-types in the English language was 609,606 words, of which a majority have extremely small probabilities. For practical purposes we can say that the wordstock of English is both very large and open-ended.

2.2

The rejection of frequency

In linguistics, the second half of the twentieth century, at least up to the 1990s, was dominated by the generative school of Noam Chomsky, who rejected the value of frequency in the study and understanding of language. Chomsky famously used the illustration of I live in Dayton, Ohio and I live in New York to show that the greater frequency of the latter sentence as compared with the former was of no linguistic relevance or interest. Of course, this had more to do with the differences of population between Dayton, Ohio and New York – from Chomsky’s point of view, a matter of performance (and hence of no value to linguistics) rather than competence. He

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concluded that “probabilistic considerations have nothing to do with grammar” (Chomsky 1964 [1962]: 215) – using grammar in a broad Chomskyan sense to include the whole language system. From that time until (roughly) the end of the century, since Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research was heavily influenced by the generative paradigm, it was difficult to find any serious reference to frequency in publications about the learning of languages, and where frequency was discussed, it was dealt with perfunctorily and sometimes negatively. The well-known authoritative handbook by Rod Ellis, The Study of Second Language Acquisition (1994), has little to say about frequency, and offers very little extra in its second edition of over a thousand pages, published as recently as 2008. The only substantial reference to frequency is in the section headed ‘The frequency hypothesis’, in which the emphasis is wholly on the learner’s input frequency (see Ellis 1994: 269–273, 2008: 241–246). For corpus linguistics, a more relevant question is: how can both the learner’s input and output be adjusted to the future likely needs of the learner as revealed in corpora?

2.3

The computer age and the revival of frequency studies

It can be said that the corpus revolution in linguistics began with the completion and distribution of the Brown Corpus in 1964.3 Shortly after, Kučera & Francis (1967) used this to create the first word frequency lists for English based on corpus data. Later, in Francis & Kučera (1982), they published lemmatized frequency lists, based on the part-of-speech (POS) tagged version of the corpus. Further word frequency lists were derived from the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus of British English (Hofland & Johansson 1982; Johansson & Hofland 1989), and for the first time grammatically informed word frequency lists derived automatically from matching computer corpora became available to the language researcher and the language teacher permitting comparison of American and British English. Of course, this was only the first step: in the last forty years, there has been an immense increase in the number of corpus-based frequency studies both for written and spoken English, as more diversified corpora as well as much larger corpora have become available. Apart from word frequency lists and studies (e.g. those derived from the British National Corpus [BNC] – Leech et al. 2001), corpus-based frequency studies have dealt with collocations (e.g. Sinclair et al. 1970, republished in Krishnamurthy 2005), and with frequency of grammatical categories, structures, etc. Here hundreds of grammatical studies could be mentioned, starting from Ehrman (1966), and culminating in a corpus-based frequency grammar of English (Biber et al. 1999) as well as with frequency studies of the language of learners (Granger 1997, 1998). It goes almost without saying that the availability of electronic corpora has revolutionized the 3. The Brown Corpus was originally issued by W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera of Brown University, under the title A Standard Sample of Present-Day Edited American English, for use with Digital Computers.



Frequency, corpora and language learning

application of frequency information whether derived from general corpora, specialized corpora, written texts or spoken transcriptions. It is also clear that frequency data from authentic texts have been one of the major driving forces of natural language processing (NLP), leading to the development of sophisticated statistical methods and probabilistic systems. One of the first steps was taken in the probabilistic POS tagging of the LOB Corpus, employing a modified Hidden Markov Process model (Marshall 1983, 1987). The history of statistical modelling in NLP, however, cannot be pursued further here. See Jelinek (1998) for further coverage.

2.4

Co-frequency, collocation

Another great step forward was taken through the pursuit of co-frequency – i.e. the frequency of X and Y occurring together in a corpus, as measured against the probability of their occurring together by chance. A serious beginning was made in Sinclair’s research discussed in his (and colleagues’) OSTI report (1970), using a small corpus of spoken English of 135,000 words. Obviously, as Sinclair pointed out, a much bigger corpus (of 20 million words or more) was needed to produce significant results for collocational analysis. This was achieved and surpassed in the 1980s and 1990s with Sinclair’s development of the Birmingham Collection of English Texts, later known as the Bank of English, as well as by other corpora such as the BNC. To give an impression of how vastly the size of corpora on which frequency studies are based has mushroomed in the last forty years: in comparison with Sinclair’s spoken corpus of 135,000 words in 1970, a recently published frequency dictionary of American English (Davies & Gardner 2010) is based on a corpus of 385,000,000 words, including 79,000,000 words of speech. This dictionary is also an innovation in providing, alongside individual word frequencies, a classified list of common collocations for each word. Word frequency lists such as those of Francis and Kučera were of limited interest to corpus linguists like John Sinclair, who urged the inadequacy of the open choice principle of treating every word-token in a string as if independently selected, as contrasted with the idiom principle whereby texts are observed to be constructed in terms of “a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments” (Sinclair 1991: 110). Sinclair’s idiom principle has since been followed up by many corpus linguists and lexicographers for whom multi-word units – collocations, lexical bundles, and the like – are essential to the fabric of language, as well as to the learning of language. Indeed, corpus research itself has shown observationally the importance of word combinations, whose significance is capable of being measured by statistical formulae such as mutual information, t-test, and log likelihood. Sinclair, in championing the idiom principle, was following to some extent in the footsteps of his former Edinburgh colleague M.A.K. Halliday, and Halliday’s teacher J.R. Firth (1957), who first gave prominence to the co-frequential concept of collocation (Halliday 1966; Sinclair 1966). Halliday (1961: 273–277) had stated that the level of lexis (including collocation) had

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to be a distinct level of linguistic description,4 and at the same time had proposed that the levels of grammar and of lexis were interrelated along a cline or continuum of delicacy (ibid. 276–277). For him, the levels of grammar and lexis constituted a single lexico-grammatical level accounting for the formal structuring of language. Many corpus linguists have espoused something like this model, evidenced as it is by a multitude of studies,5 with the result that the interpenetration of grammar and lexis (and hence the spread of lexical frequency-based concepts into grammar) has become widely accepted. In this respect, it can be said that the corpus revolution has introduced a new theoretical perspective on linguistic structuring: one in bold contrast to the mainstream paradigm of Chomsky (e.g. Chomsky 1965: 84–88) whereby grammar and lexicon are two clearly distinct components. It also challenges a tradition long established in language study, whereby grammars and dictionaries provide distinct kinds of information about a language, and are published in separate covers.

3. Recent progress in frequency studies relevant to language learning In this part of the chapter I will revisit four topics already briefly touched on, showing how studies of frequency have been increasingly applied to various linguistic units or components: a. b. c. d.

word frequency (by register, region, etc.) co-frequency between words – lexis and collocation grammatical frequency lexico-grammatical frequency – co-frequency between lexis and grammatical structures

I will consider how these topics have been advanced by recent research. Other linguistic levels at which frequency has been somewhat less investigated, e.g. semantics, will remain in the background.

3.1

How frequency is important for English Language Teaching (ELT)

First, let us revisit word frequency lists. The case for ‘more frequent = more important to learn’ is simply put: “The reasoning behind this position is that learners should be taught what is most frequent in language, since it is what is of most use to them” (Gilquin 2006a: 58). In other words, the more frequent a word is in language use, the more likely it is to be useful to the learner. This is (a) because it will be more frequently 4. “So there must be a theory of lexis, to account for that part of linguistic form which grammar cannot handle” (Halliday 1961: 273). 5. For example, Moon (1998), Nesselhauf (2005), Adolphs (2008), Römer & Schulze (2009), and a rich range of studies contributed to Granger & Meunier (2008).



Frequency, corpora and language learning

encountered in the language use of other people, and (b) because it will be more frequently needed for the learner’s own language use.

3.2

Word frequency associated with language varieties

However, frequency counts are least useful when they are based on a general corpus covering the range of the language; they are more useful if they are differentiated for region and register. This is one advantage that the corpus revolution has brought, and which was lacking in earlier manually-based studies. Earlier I mentioned briefly Johansson & Hofland’s (1989) frequency lists of comparable corpora for American English (AmE) and British English (BrE): Brown and LOB. These and other corpora in the Brown family show differences in regional varieties of written English and show, for example, that the auxiliaries must, may, should and shall have been declining sharply in frequency, and that in this decline BrE is following in the wake of a sharper decline in AmE (Leech et al. 2009: 71–83). It is also possible to compare AmE and BrE in terms of spoken English: two comparable corpora of conversation (the demographically sampled part of the BNC and the Longman Corpus of Spoken American English [LCSAE]) show that in AmE, much more than in BrE, ‘core’ modals like must, may, should and shall are less frequent than in the written language, whereas some ‘semimodals’ resulting from grammaticalization – constructions like be going to and have to – have reached a greater frequency than most core modals (see Leech et al. 2009: 100). In Leech et al. (2001), based on the BNC, we presented word frequency lists for both written and spoken English, and also lists of words which were most ‘key’ in these two varieties (i.e. those most strongly associated with written texts or with spoken texts). Dictionaries such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) also give variety-differentiated frequency information. Since its third edition (1995), LDOCE has flagged words in the first thousand, second thousand, and third thousand in terms of frequency in speech and in writing, differentiating between their occurrence in the two media, where not surprisingly word frequencies differ greatly. For example, in Table 1 the items in List A are in the top 1,000 words for speech, but below the top 3,000 in writing: in other words, these words are much more at home in the Table 1.╇ Words strongly associated with spoken (List A) and written (List B) English List A: Words strongly associated with the spoken medium

List B: Words strongly associated with the written medium

awful, basically, bet (verb), daddy, dear (interj), exam, go (noun), hello (interj), hi (interj), hopefully, like (adv), like (conj), mine (pron), mom, mummy, OK (adv), OK (interj), ours (pron.), penny, phone (verb), rid (adj), yeah (interj), yep (interj)

authority, institution, security, program (noun), reveal, sector, king, thus

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spoken medium. On the other hand, those in List B are in the top 1,000 words for writing, but below the top 3,000 in speech: they strongly prefer the written medium. In addition to frequency information about speech and writing, there are also corpus-based frequency lists relating to different registers or domains – such as the Academic Word List of Coxhead (2000). Such differentiated frequency information is potentially very useful for learners of a language, or more directly, for those preparing teaching materials, selecting reading materials, or devising tests. Up to recently, corpora have been restricted largely to the written medium, and frequency lists were presented as undifferentiated as to variety: words like daddy and institutional would appear side by side one another in the same list without much distinction (in fact, their overall frequencies in the entire BNC are close – 22 and 20 occurrences per million words respectively). So this is a decided step forward: for the learner, vocabulary resources for speech are very different from vocabulary resources for writing, and corpora have enabled us to see this clearly and in considerable detail.6 A further innovation in recent lexicography for advanced learners has been the recognition also of semantic frequency. Using again the example of LDOCE (1995 and later editions), the various senses of a word are listed under each headword in frequency order, and likewise homographs are presented in frequency order. In such ways, dictionaries using corpus resources for the advanced learner have been striving to supply the information the learner needs most frequently in readily accessible form.

3.3

A more considered view

The principle “more frequent = more important to learn” can scarcely be gainsaid as a general principle. However, one of the discoveries from the study of learner corpora is that non-native students of English tend to overuse the words towards the top of the frequency lists: A number of studies reveal that learners from a wide variety of (unrelated) mother tongue backgrounds display a common tendency to overuse common, non-specific words such as important (...) or big or nice (De Cock & Granger 2004: 78)

Part of this effect may well be due to failure to adapt to the written medium: it is true that words such as big and nice are very frequent – but this is only in the spoken medium, whereas nice, in particular, is rather infrequent in writing. A more general reason for overuse of common words is that they are the words learners have encountered and used most in the past. They are inevitably words with which the learners feel most familiar, most confident and most comfortable – “lexical teddy bears”, as Hasselgren (1994) calls them. Hence it is important to make a distinction between frequency in 6. This is all the more important since learners tend to confuse spoken and written registers (see e.g. Altenberg & Tapper 1998 or Gilquin & Paquot 2008).



Frequency, corpora and language learning

past experience for the learner, and frequency in projected future experience. The reason for prioritizing commoner items over less common items in teaching is that they are predictably the items the learner will encounter, and need to use, more frequently in the future. But the reason why learners overuse common words must be that they are the words they have encountered and used most frequently in the past. The conclusion is that, if we are to follow the ‘more frequent = more important to learn’ principle, attainment in vocabulary acquisition must be linked progressively and systematically to extending the range of use to less common vocabulary, including less common uses of frequent words (cf. Lennon 1996).7 The focus of learning should be step by step on less frequent items which the learner needs to entrench for further use. From a testing perspective too, as Alderson (2007) points out, less common items are more discriminatory in the evaluation of levels of performance – for example, in vocabulary size placement tests. All this indicates that, applied to learning processes, frequency should be a relative, not an absolute quantity. What is important is that more common words should be most usefully learned before less common words, whether those more common words are in the top bands of frequency or not. So far, then, the postulate ‘more frequent = more important to learn’ has not been overthrown. The overuse effect implies simply that the students, in their learning process, have not progressed down the frequency list as far as is desirable. They are relying too much on well-worn and well-loved paths of expression.

3.4

Frequency of word combinations: Is it more important than frequency of individual words?8

Teubert (2004: 188) goes so far as to claim: “Not simple words but collocations constitute the true vocabulary of a language”. This may be going too far, as Teubert here embraces the idiom principle one hundred percent. Nevertheless, the formulaicity of English has been calculated as around 21% in written texts and even higher (30%) in spoken language (Biber et al. 1999: 993–994).9 Learning vocabulary is not just a matter 7. Also we should include here the collocational patterns of frequent words, usually disregarded at more advanced levels because the words are considered as easy or known, whilst studies have shown that these collocational patterns were not mastered even at an advanced level (see for instance Nesselhauf 2003). 8. As background to this section, see Durrant (2009) and Ellis & Simpson-Vlach (2009). 9. There are many ways of defining formulaicity (see Moon 1998) and the percentage figures here are derived from a very specific definition: lexical bundles (3-grams and 4-grams) recurring at least 10 times per million words. These percentages are estimated from Biber et al.’s (1999: 993–994) Figures 13.2 and 13.3. A somewhat earlier study by Eeg-Olofsson & Altenberg (1996) reported that as many as 86% of words in two 5,000-word samples (one monologue, the other dialogue) “were part of a recurrent word combination in one way or another”. See also Altenberg (1998).

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of acquiring individual words, but of acquiring phraseology. Hence frequency of word combinations, as well as of words, should be an important input to the learning process. The strange thing is that, according to De Cock (1998), the percentage of formulaicity in learners’ productions is even higher than in those of native speakers (although some formulae are erroneous). Again, this may be the result of a ‘teddy bear’ effect, whereby learners hang on to the use of well-worn and familiar phrases, rather than risking new ones.

3.5

Grammatical frequency

The focus has been mainly on lexical frequency so far – the easiest kind of frequency data to extract from corpora. The collection of data on frequency of grammatical categories, grammatical constructions and the like can be achieved automatically only if the corpus has been annotated with the grammatical information supplied by POS tagging and (ideally) parsing.10 This annotation process is far from easy. Alternatively, unless the grammatical items happen to be unambiguously identifiable from their orthographic form, grammatical information has to be gathered laboriously by manual intervention. Nevertheless, much has been learned from corpora about grammatical frequency since the first POS tagging (of the Brown Corpus) was achieved in 1970 (Greene & Rubin 1971). Many results come from individual case studies of particular areas of English grammar. A more concerted corpus-based account of grammatical frequency is provided by the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999). At the more theoretical level, one rather unexpected finding (Sampson 2007) is that frequency of grammatical structures, defined as tree fragments or mother-daughter sequences, follows a Zipfian curve similar to that of word frequency, with an enormous tail of structures occurring only once in a corpus, just as the tail of vocabulary frequency (around 50%) consists of words that only occur once (hapax legomena). This is surprising for those brought up in the Chomskyan framework (Chomsky 1957: 13) where there is assumed to be a clear dividing line between items which are grammatical and those which are not. The common assumption up to recently has been that the grammar is a closed system of rules whereas the lexicon is open-ended. On grammatical frequency, perhaps even more than lexical frequency, corpus findings can be surprising alike to native speakers and to experienced teachers of the language. For example, it has been reported that teachers of English, when asked whether the present progressive or the present simple is more common, typically opt 10. However, tagging and even parsing do not necessarily imply that the retrieval of grammatical phenomena is fully automatic. Sometimes, considerable manual post-editing is necessary (cf. Gilquin 2002). On the other hand, advanced corpus software such as BNCweb (for use with the BNC) can undertake queries leading to the retrieval of syntactic patterns by use of a powerful query syntax known as CQP employing regular expressions – see Hoffmann et al. (2008: 215–243).



Frequency, corpora and language learning 

for the progressive.11 This choice is reinforced by the fact that in syllabuses, the present progressive has sometimes been taught before the present simple. Teachers, it can be supposed, are hugely surprised to be told that (according to corpus evidence) the progressive aspect is about 20 times less common than the simple non-progressive aspect (see Figure 2). Another illustration of how teaching practices in grammar have been notoriously at odds with corpus evidence is that of conditional sentences. For a generation at least, Thomson & Martinet’s (1980: 186–192) best-selling grammar textbook helped to perpetuate the time-honoured assumption that there are just three categories of conditional which learners of English have to master:12 First conditional: Protasis: present simple Apodosis: will + infinitive e.g. If you don’t get it he’ll repeat it. Second conditional: Protasis: past simple Apodosis: would + infinitive e.g. If I had an acre to plant, I would spend all day working on it. Third conditional: Protasis: past perfect Apodosis: would have + infinitive e.g. If I’d owned it, I would have thrown it away. [Examples from the LCSAE]

simp perf prog perf+prog

Figure 2.╇ Chart showing the frequency of the simple aspect (non-perfect, non-progressive) compared with those of the perfect and progressive aspects (based on Biber et al. 1999: 461–462; the portions represent percentages of all verb phrases)

11. Douglas Biber, personal communication: “I have used this example in literally dozens of talks, and I consistently get the same result. The most dramatic case was probably a plenary that I gave at AAAL several years ago. The estimated attendance was c. 800, but only c. 20 raised their hand to vote for simple aspect as more frequent”. 12. To be fair, Thomson and Martinet allow for variants on these three patterns, for example where other modals than will and would occur. More recent pedagogical accounts of grammar tend to include the zero type. For further corpus evidence and discussion, see Gabrielatos (2003, 2007).

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Geoffrey Leech 30

60

20

Manner & Place

10 0

M-->P

40

0

P-->M

Place & Time

20 P-->T

T-->P

30 20

Manner & Time

10 0

M-->T

Key: --> means “before”

T--> M

Figure 3.╇ Likelihood of Manner preceding Place, Place preceding Time, and Manner preceding Time (based of Biber et al. 1999: 811; frequencies per 10,000 words)

However, corpora show that more frequent than each of these three is the unmodalized conditional, often called the ‘zero type’, typically with the present simple tense in both clauses: If you do it in twenty days, you’re wonderful. [Example from the LCSAE]

For the millions of learners who have sweated over the second and third conditionals, it might be a comfort (or alternatively, a vexation) to know that these are fairly rare in comparison with the type just illustrated. Yet a further example is the ‘MPT rule’, repeated in many books and materials, decreeing that the order of adverbials at the end of a clause is ‘Manner followed by Place and Place followed by Time’. In practice, this turns out to be a probabilistic rule, and not a very good one at that. The charts in Figure 3 show the likelihood that these three classes will occur in the order stated.13 As the anecdote of the progressive just mentioned suggests, ‘authoritative’ figures in language teaching, whether teachers, materials writers or just native speakers, are very poor at guessing relative frequencies of grammatical classes and structures. If the time wasted teaching rather uncommon structures and weak rules is to be avoided, the ‘more frequent = more important to learn’ principle should be applied to grammar. This is where corpus evidence again becomes crucial.

3.6

Phraseology and the interaction of lexis and grammar

In the interaction of lexis and grammar, frequency helps to unlock predictable patterns of meaning. This is definitely an area of corpus-based investigation whose hour has come. Recently, various frameworks have been put forward extending the 13. The data for Figure 3 comes from Biber et al. (1999: 811), Figures 10.14–16.



Frequency, corpora and language learning 

collocational analysis paradigm to apply to frequency of co-occurrence of both lexical and grammatical choices: a. Pattern grammar: described as “a corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English” (Hunston & Francis 2000) b. Collostructions: the statistical measurement of the degree of attraction or repulsion between words and constructions (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) c. Word sketches: use of the Sketch Engine software to derive a summary of a word’s collocational behaviour in terms of grammatical slots (Kilgarriff & Tugwell 2002) d. Concgrams: use of ConcGram software to generate word-collocations of variable position and distance, such that (for example) play a role, play an important role, a key role to play can all be listed as belonging to the same concordance output (Cheng et al. 2006) Here I will not go into the technical characteristics distinguishing these approaches from one another. The important point, as I see it, is that they all explore statistically the until-recently-neglected interface between lexis and grammar. Lexis, in its pure Hallidayan and Sinclairian form, focuses on patterns of word co-occurrence while excluding generalizations on the level of grammatical structure.14 On the other hand, many approaches to grammar have neglected the level of lexical patterning. Surely the most valuable way to synthesise the relations between lexis and grammar within a single lexico-grammatical framework is to use corpus linguistic techniques such as those in (a)–(d) above. I will illustrate this with just two examples, the first of word sketches and the second of collostructions. Table 2 displays a word sketch of the noun bank, showing its co-occurrence connections in terms of frequency and salience (a strength-of-association measure), with verbs in the Subject-of relation, with verbs in the Object-of relation and with adjectives or nouns as modifiers of bank. The automated analysis of grammatical structure, as shown by the Sketch Engine, has reached a stage where errors are rather few, and results can be regarded as substantially reliable. On the other hand, a semantic element of analysis is still lacking, as we can see from the juxtaposition at the top of the Object-of list of burst (where the bank is obviously a river bank) and rob (where the bank is obviously a financial institution). The second and rather similar technique derives from Stefanowitch & Gries’s (2003) statistical concept of collostructional analysis interrelating (as its name suggests) collocational analysis and construction grammar. It can be illustrated from the analysis of the construction [Verb NP as X] by Gries et al. (2005: 649) – see Table 3. The interesting debate here lies in two different measures, item frequency and strength-of-association (collostructional strength), which can produce different results. In Table 3, the verbs see and describe are more frequent in this construction than 14. See Halliday (1961: 273–277), Halliday (1966) and Sinclair (1966).

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Table 2.╇ Part of a word sketch (after Kilgarriff & Tugwell 2002: 131) of the noun bank subject-of

num

sal

object-of

num

sal

modifier

num

sal

lend issue charge operate step deposit borrow eavesdrop finance underwrite account wish

95 60 29 45 15 10 12 â•⁄ 4 13 â•⁄ 6 19 26

21.2 11.8 â•⁄ 9.5 â•⁄ 8.9 â•⁄ 7.7 â•⁄ 7.6 â•⁄ 7.6 â•⁄ 7.5 â•⁄ 7.2 â•⁄ 7.2 â•⁄ 7.1 â•⁄ 7.1

burst rob overflow line privatize defraud climb break oblige sue instruct owe

27 31 â•⁄ 7 13 â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 5 12 32 â•⁄ 7 â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 9

16.4 15.3 10.2 â•⁄ 8.4 â•⁄ 7.9 â•⁄ 6.6 â•⁄ 5.9 â•⁄ 5.5 â•⁄ 5.2 â•⁄ 4.7 â•⁄ 4.5 â•⁄ 4.3

central Swiss commercial grassy royal far steep issuing confirming correspondent state-owned eligible

755 â•⁄ 87 231 â•⁄ 42 336 â•⁄ 93 â•⁄ 50 â•⁄ 23 â•⁄ 13 â•⁄ 15 â•⁄ 18 â•⁄ 16

25.5 18.7 18.6 18.5 18.2 15.6 14.4 14.0 13.8 11.9 11.1 11.1

num = number of tokensâ•…â•…â•…â•… sal = salience (roughly: strength of association)

Table 3.╇ A partial collostructional listing (from Gries et al. 2005: 649) of verbs most strongly attracted to the construction [Verb NP as X] verb in construction regard describe see know treat define use view map

number of tokens

collostruction strength

verb in construction

number of tokens

collostruction strength

â•⁄ 80 â•⁄ 88 111 â•⁄ 79 â•⁄ 21 â•⁄ 18 â•⁄ 42 â•⁄ 12 â•⁄â•⁄ 8

166.476 134.870 â•⁄ 78.790 â•⁄ 42.796 â•⁄ 28.224 â•⁄ 23.843 â•⁄ 21.425 â•⁄ 17.861 â•⁄ 12.796

recognise/ize categorise/ize perceive hail appoint interpret class denounce dismiss

12 â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 3 â•⁄ 5 â•⁄ 5 â•⁄ 3 â•⁄ 3 â•⁄ 4

12.159 11.525 â•⁄ 8.304 â•⁄ 6.316 â•⁄ 6.073 â•⁄ 5.920 â•⁄ 5.379 â•⁄ 5.158 â•⁄ 5.079

regard. But regard is a more ‘typical’ verb to use with the [Verb NP as X] construction, because a larger proportion of its tokens occur with this construction as compared with others. It is more securely attracted (or ‘bonded’) to this construction than to others. Describe and (especially) see are more general-purpose verbs that do not have this special relationship with the construction. As another illustration, Stefanowitsch & Gries (2003: 231) determine the collostructional strength of verbs with the progressive. The most strongly bonded verbs, in order, are talk, go, try, look, work, sit and wait. This order is obviously not that of the frequency of the verbs themselves, which is (as it happens) as follows: go, look, work, try, talk, sit and wait. The debate is to determine whether learners acquire the construction better



Frequency, corpora and language learning 

with common verbs or with bonded verbs: arguably a matter for SLA specialists, rather than corpus linguists. But surely both measures are potentially useful to the learner.

4. New directions in applied linguistics favourable to frequency In this section, striking an optimistic, forward-looking note, I take account of present directions of research favouring the importance of frequency. After this, I turn less optimistically in Section 5 to the problems of determining frequency relevant to language learning. Twenty years ago, there was very little support for the idea that frequency phenomena contribute to our understanding of language and language learning. Now, I believe, there has been something of a transformation which brings frequency increasingly into the limelight. I will say something about: a theoretical positions favouring frequency (Section 4.1) b. frequency effects in language change (Section 4.2) c. frequency effects in language acquisition, including both L1 and L2 learning (Section 4.3)

4.1

Theoretical positions favouring frequency

Three theoretical positions which have been gaining momentum since the 1990s all implicitly or explicitly give frequency a role in the workings of language: usage-based linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and construction grammar. These three differentlylabelled approaches are so closely linked that they could be called different facets of the same theoretical paradigm. Usage-based linguistics (based on observation and analysis of language in use – see Barlow & Kemmer 2000) reacts strongly against Chomsky’s position that linguistics is concerned with competence (a mental phenomenon) rather than with performance (the use of language in utterances and texts) – or, to use a later terminology, with (internal) I-language rather than with (external) E-language. During the heyday of the generative paradigm, as we have seen, performance-based theorizing was inevitably eclipsed, although the usage-oriented paradigm of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, for example, maintained a following (largely outside the USA). More recently, usage-based approaches have made a significant comeback, especially in the western part of the USA. Cognitive grammar/linguistics has also gained momentum in the western states of the USA since the 1970s, and is perhaps found in its most influential form in the cognitive grammar of Langacker (1987). Although this is not the place to expound the theoretical foundations of the cognitive linguistics enterprise, among its important tenets is that the way we use and process language is integral to the nature of language

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as a cognitive phenomenon. In this sense cognitive linguistics is usage-oriented. The notion of entrenchment is key to Langacker’s cognitive grammar: repeated exposure to a linguistic item makes the difference between an item that is strongly and centrally established as part of language cognition (entrenched), and one that is weakly established and peripheral. Entrenchment is central to processes of language acquisition, and it is dependent on frequency: the more frequently a linguistic item has been encountered and used, the more entrenched in the language user’s competence it is likely to be (see Langacker 1987: 100; Gries 2006). Construction grammar (Fillmore et al. 1988; Goldberg 1995) is a framework for describing and accounting for language structure in terms of constructions, rather than ‘words and rules’. A construction is a symbolic unit that combines both form and meaning, and may be linguistically complex. It is commonly postulated that constructions are learned and stored as wholes, and that they are learned from the bottom up, on the basis of actual language use. A construction can be an idiomatic combination of words, like garbage in, garbage out; it can also be semi-idiomatic, like the let alone construction, or an abstract pattern such as the double-object construction. Hence constructions accord with the phraseologists’ view of a grammar-lexicon continuum, for which Goldberg has coined the term constructicon. Once again, frequency plays a role, in that frequency of occurrence in the learning process is seen as a necessary precondition for construction status. These three approaches are indeed so closely linked that some might object to their being distinguished from one another. For example, ‘cognitive linguistics’ could be regarded as a cover term that includes construction grammar, and has the usagebased approach as one of its chief tenets.

4.2

Frequency effects in language change

In diachronic linguistics, frequency has come to the fore above all in the theory of grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott 2003), which focuses on the way lexical material becomes (over time) converted into grammatical material as a prime force in language change. Many studies (e.g. Hooper 1976; Bybee & Hopper 2001; Bybee 2007) show the relevance of frequency, both as an input and as an output to the grammaticalization process. For example, frequent expressions are susceptible to phonetic reduction (e.g. don’t know --> dunno; kind of --> kinda), a trigger of grammaticalization. Also, after the criterial changes of grammaticalization have taken place, the increase in frequency can continue for centuries – witness the rise in frequency of the English progressive, a continuous development from before Early Modern English up to the present day. Recent short-term diachronic studies using the Brown family of corpora show significant trends in change of grammatical frequency partly motivated by grammaticalization as well as other processes, such as colloquialization. Leech et al. (2009: 142–143) find that frequency changes like the increasing use of the progressive cannot be attributed to expansion of the progressive to particular verb classes or other



Frequency, corpora and language learning 

categorical, structural or semantic trends. Rather, there seems to be a general increase of frequency across the board. It seems a fairly natural assumption that one result of a strengthened cognitive representation of a linguistic form is that it gets used more often by individuals, and more generally by the language community. Thus, from this perspective, input frequency and output frequency are both concomitants of grammatical change: greater input frequency → greater entrenchment → greater output frequency

4.3

Frequency effects in language acquisition

The sequence represented graphically above is primarily, of course, to be applied to language development in the individual, and only secondarily to a whole language community of users. Tomasello (2003), more than anyone else, has demonstrated the case for a usage-based theoretical position on first language acquisition, rejecting Chomsky’s view of universal grammar as a genetic basis for language acquisition, and instead arguing for the view that language acquisition takes place through implicit learning (using cognitively generic learning strategies) of patterns of form and meaning encountered in the child’s language input. Further, Ellis (2002a, 2002b) has presented persuasively the evidence of frequency effects in language processing generally, and more particularly in SLA. He finds that explicit and implicit learning and memory are complementary, implicit learning being driven by frequency of exposure. These two learning processes are seen as coming from very different neurological sources, the implicit capability deriving from the hippocampal system, and explicit learning from the neo-cortical system. Frequency of activation leads to the (implicit) learning of prototype categories. However, our knowledge of frequency is unconscious, and research has shown that even experts in language and language teaching have a poor record of guessing the frequency of linguistic items such as verbs (cf. Alderson 2007). These findings explain why (in the anecdote mentioned earlier) language teachers are unable to recognize that the present simple is many times more frequent than the present progressive. Ellis’s frequency effects link SLA with the idiom principle, the phraseological perspective on learning, construction grammar, and data-driven learning (Johns 1994). They indicate how learning is adaptive to an unfolding history of inputs, how change is incremental and cumulative, and how prior activation facilitates subsequent activation. As we learn to process high-frequency phenomena such as multi-word expressions and collostructions faster, we become more adapted to identifying them as units and processing them holistically. Priority in learning goes to formulae, then to higher structures (both subsumed under the constructions of construction grammar). Ellis’s line of research ties psycholinguistic research in language processing and SLA closely to learner corpus research. Researchers in SLA and in learner corpora, which seemed

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Geoffrey Leech

to be on separate tracks a few years ago, are at last coming together (see Granger et al. 2002) and frequency appears to be a key link between them. We can now begin to see how the principle of ‘more frequent = more important to learn’ fits in with advances in learning theory and SLA. Institutional L2 teaching often has to implement adaptive learning within the confines of a curriculum where opportunities for L2 input and L2 output are severely limited in time. An important goal, in this case, is to present the learners with materials and productive tasks that extend their range of competence by moving them as far as possible from frequent towards less frequent. The implicit learning which is dominant in L1 acquisition can, of course, be complemented in L2 acquisition by explicit learning, which, through the conscious ‘noticing’ of language phenomena (see Schmidt 1990, 1995), can improve the learner’s control of the language.

5. Challenges and possible solutions The preceding section leads to the conclusion that frequency is an important consideration in language learning, and, since corpora are the only practicable means of supplying frequency information, this is where corpus linguistics should be able to make a key contribution. However, we should not paint too rosy a picture of this marriage between corpus linguistics and SLA: there are difficulties in determining the relevance of frequency, and in supplying the corpus-derived information needed.

5.1

Challenge I: Bringing together corpus linguistic and cognitive linguistic approaches

We have seen that corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics are becoming strongly linked through the usage-based paradigm. But there are some signs that the ‘more frequent = more important to learn’ principle is not always supported by cognitive linguistics. Gries (2006) and Gilquin (2006b) present two examples where what is prototypical (and therefore more salient and central from a cognitive perspective) does not correspond to what is most frequent. Gries’s analysis of the verb run from both the cognitive and the corpus angle suggests that there is a discrepancy between the most likely prototype sense of run (motion) and the most frequent sense (fast pedestrian movement). Similarly, Gilquin’s analysis of causative verb constructions leads her to the conclusion that the prototypical case of causation is not the most frequent. Although determination of what is the prototype is far from clear-cut, these result appear to contradict the implication, for example, from Ellis’s work, that the most frequent category is the most entrenched and therefore the most cognitively salient. Perhaps one way of resolving this conundrum is to recognize that the establishment of a prototype category in the adult competence may have taken place at a relatively earlier stage



Frequency, corpora and language learning 

of language acquisition, when (for example) the ‘fast pedestrian movement’ sense of run would in fact be the sense in commonest use. Hence the most prototypical usage would not necessarily be the one found most frequently in an adult corpus. However, there is much more work to be done on this.

5.2

Challenge II: Corpora do not always match learners’ needs

There are many different kinds of corpora, but none of them seem to be exactly the kind of corpus that will give frequency information relevant to learners. For English, for example, the following varieties of corpora have been, or can be, used to provide the empirical basis for ELT materials: a. General purpose reference or monitor corpora (e.g. the BNC, the Bank of English) b. Corpora of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) (e.g. Corpus of Professional English, CSPAE, MICASE, BASE Corpus)15 c. Corpora of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learner language (e.g. ICLE, LINDSEI)16 d. Corpora containing the language of native speaker (NS) children (e.g. CHILDES)17 e. Corpora of teenager and young adult NSs (e.g. LOCNESS, COLT)18 f. Corpora of English as a Lingua Franca (e.g. VOICE, ELFA)19 This list is far from complete and new corpora are making their appearance month by month. In fact, there are so many corpora of potential use for English language education that it may seem perverse to suggest that they are not enough. To some extent, though, it is a matter of debate what kind of corpus best suits the needs of a learner. The general principle, I suggest, is that such a corpus should represent as far as possible the target linguistic communicative behaviour to which learning is directed. Despite the usefulness of the above types of corpora for various purposes, there are reasons why they are not optimal for particular groups of language learners. General purpose corpora (a), containing both written and spoken material, although they yield frequency data useful for adult learners, are less useful for younger adults such

15. Corpus of Spoken, Professional American-English; Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English; corpus of British Academic Spoken English. 16. International Corpus of Learner English; Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. 17. Child Language Data Exchange System. 18. Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays; Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. 19. Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English; English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings.

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as the average undergraduate student, and because of their ‘adult’ style and content, might be considered quite unsuitable for primary or secondary school learners. The same applies to ESP and EAP corpora (b) such as MICASE: these are well tailored to the academic needs of students or those training for a professional career, but not for more general groups. Corpora of learner language (c) such as ICLE and LINDSEI do, of course, provide vital frequency data for comparison of learners’ language to that of NSs, as well as comparison of the interlanguage of learners of different mother tongue backgrounds. Even here, however, it remains somewhat problematic whether the target linguistic behaviour with which the language of such student learners should be compared is that of NSs of the target language of their own age group, or the specialist adults we typically find as authors in written corpora of NSs, or indeed some other target communities such as non-native speakers (NNS) using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), whose language use is recorded in a corpus such as VOICE. For learners of primary school and high school ages, there is as yet a dearth of NS children’s/teenagers’ language of primary or secondary school age (d-e), although CHILDES contains a wide variety of spoken data of earlier age groups. Corpora of ELF (f), e.g. VOICE (Seidlhofer 2004) or ELFA (Mauranen 2006), are new contenders on the scene, and raise the whole question of whether NSs’ language should any longer be regarded as the standard to aim at, as it has been unquestioningly considered in the past. In all these kinds of corpora (except for the largest reference and monitor corpora) there is an issue, also, about the size of available corpora and their representativeness in terms of different registers and activity types. A corpus intended to represent frequency data of target language behaviour should ideally be large and wide-ranging enough to yield reliable frequencies not only of words but of collocations: something that requires large corpora. For the normal EFL educational curriculum, the ideal corpus should be longitudinal, representing competent target language use appropriate to the age cohort of the learners. An early example of such a corpus (for NS learners, however) was the 5-million-word text collection used for the AHI Frequency Book (Carroll et al. 1971), which consisted of reading text materials used in US schools from the third grade to twelfth grade. Textbooks, readers, and other learning materials have been used for research both in Germany and in Japan, but the emphasis of the research (e.g. Mindt 1996; Römer 2005) has been to show how far the language to which students are exposed in school is divergent from that of NS corpora. Recent research on corpora of textbooks is reported in Meunier & Gouverneur (2009), who also give an account of their TeMa (Textbook Material) corpus consisting of general-purpose best-selling international ELT textbooks. So here is another issue: how appropriate is the teaching-induced language on which students are led, through their curriculum, to model themselves? It seems that, for various reasons, we are far from an ideal situation in which the frequency information applied to learner input comes from a corpus tailor-made to meet the learner’s needs.



Frequency, corpora and language learning 

6. Conclusion: With words of comfort In spite of the negative points raised in the preceding section, it should be emphasized in conclusion that frequency information remains a highly valuable resource for input to language learning materials and testing, and that it is increasingly available. To insist on precise frequency counts is often to aim at too high an ideal, for, as Halliday put it long ago (1971: 344), “a rough indication of frequency is often just what is needed”. The afore-mentioned case of teachers who believed the present progressive to be more frequent than the present simple illustrates just how wildly wrong people’s intuitions of linguistic frequency can be: virtually any corpus representing NS productions, spoken or written, would correct this erroneous belief. A further point (referring back to distinctions I made in Section 1) is that in general, corpora differ much more in terms of raw frequency or normalized frequency than in terms of ordinal frequency (the placing of items in an order of frequency). Fortunately, raw or normalized frequency counts are rarely needed: ordinal frequency (allowing certain items to be prioritized above others) is usually all that matters for language learning and teaching purposes. The greatest need, I believe, is for the development of longitudinal corpora of both NSs and NNS learners. However, without waiting for the Holy Grail of the ideally tailored corpus for a given learner group, much could be achieved by building a database of frequency data from a range of different corpora and subcorpora, to enable ELT professionals to compare frequencies in different styles, registers, age groups, etc. For a given target learner group, corpora could be given weightings relative to their relevance to the group, resulting in optimal frequencies approximating to the learners’ needs. In this way the best available value could be put on Halliday’s call for approximate frequency. One final point: the emphasis on frequency in this chapter should not mislead any reader into thinking that ‘all we need to do is to count things’. In the selecting, devising and grading of learning materials, not only frequency, but other values, such as learner interest and motivation, learner difficulty, etc. need to be factored in. But, to correct what I believe to have been the neglect of frequency in thinking up to now, I suggest that from now on, there is no reason why any choices regarding learner input, learner performance and learner evaluation should not be frequency-informed.

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Geoffrey Leech Altenberg, B. & Tapper, M. 1998. The use of adverbial connectors in advanced Swedish learners’ written English. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 80–93. London: AddisonWesley Longman. Barlow, M. & Kemmer, S. 2000. Usage-based Models of Language. Stanford CA: CSLI. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Bybee, J. 2007. Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford: OUP. Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds). 2001. Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure [Typological Studies in Language 45]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Carroll, J.B. 1971. Statistical analysis of the corpus. In The American Heritage Frequency Book, J.B. Carroll, P. Davies & B. Richman (eds), xxi-xl. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. Carroll, J.B., Davies, P. & Richman, B. 1971. The American Heritage Frequency Book. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. Cheng, W., Greaves, C. & Warren, M. 2006. From n-gram to skipgram to concgram. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11(4): 411–433. Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. 1964 [1962]. A transformational approach to syntax. In Proceedings of the Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistics Analysis, A.A. Hill (ed.), 124–158. Austin TX: University of Texas. (Reprinted in J.A. Fodor & J.J. Katz. 1964. The Structure of Language, 211–241. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.) Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Coxhead, A. 2000. A new Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly 34(2): 213–238. Davies, M. & Gardner, D. 2010. A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English. London: Routledge. De Cock, S. 1998. A recurrent word combination approach to the study of formulae in the speech of native and non-native speakers of English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 3: 59–80. De Cock, S. & Granger, S. 2004. Computer learner corpora and monolingual learners’ dictionaries: The perfect match. In The Corpus Approach to Lexicography, W. Teubert & M. Mahlberg (eds), Special issue of Lexicographica 20: 72–86. Durrant, P. 2009. Investigating the viability of a collocation list for students of English for Academic Purposes. English for Specific Purposes 28(3): 157–169. Eeg-Olofsson, M. & Altenberg, B. 1996. Recurrent word combinations in the London-Lund Corpus: Coverage and use for word-class tagging. In Studies in Synchronic Corpus Linguistics, C.E. Percy, C.F. Meyer & I. Lancashire (eds), 97–107. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ehrman, M.E. 1966. The Meanings of the Modals in Present-Day American English. The Hague: Mouton. Ellis, N.C. 2002a. Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24(2): 249–260. Ellis, N.C. 2002b. Reflections on frequency effects in language processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24(2): 297–339. Ellis, N.C. & Simpson-Vlach, R. 2009. Formulaic language in native speakers: Triangulating psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and education. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 5: 61–78. Ellis, R. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP. Ellis, R. 2008. The Study of Second Language Acquisition, 2nd edn. Oxford: OUP.



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Geoffrey Leech Hasselgren, A. 1994. Lexical teddy bears and advanced learners: A study into the ways Norwegian students cope with English vocabulary. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 4(2): 237–258. Hoffmann, S., Evert, S., Smith, N., Lee, D. & Berglund Prytz, Y. 2008. Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb – A Practical Guide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Hofland, K. & Johansson, S. 1982. Word Frequencies in British and American English. Bergen: Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities. Hooper, J. 1976. Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of morphophonological change. In Current Progress in Historical Linguistics, W. Christie (ed.), 96–105. Amsterdam: North Holland. Hopper, P.J. & Traugott, E.C. 2003[1993]. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Hunston, S. & Francis, G. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 4]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jelinek, F. 1998. Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Johansson, S. & Hofland, K. 1989. Frequency Analysis of English Vocabulary and Grammar: Based on the LOB Corpus, 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johns, 1994. From printout to handout: Grammar and vocabulary teaching in the context of data-driven learning. In Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar, T. Odlin (ed.), 293–317. Cambridge: CUP. Kennedy, G. 1998. An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London: Addison-Wesley Longman. Kilgarriff, A. & Tugwell, D. 2002. Sketching words. In Lexicography and Natural Language Processing: A Festschrift in Honour of B.T.S. Atkins, M-H. Corréard (ed.), 125–137. EURALEX. Krishnamurthy, R. (ed.). 2005. English Collocation Studies: The OSTI Report, by J. Sinclair, S. Jones & R. Daley. London: Continuum. Kučera, H. & Francis, W.N. 1967. Computational Analysis of Present-day American English. Providence RD: Brown University Press. Langacker, R.W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C. & Smith, N. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. Leech, G., Rayson, P. & Wilson, A. 2001. Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus. Harlow: Longman. Lennon, P. 1996. Getting ‘easy’ verbs wrong at the advanced level. International Review of Applied Linguistics 34(1): 23–36. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 3rd edn, Dir. D. Summers. 1995. London: Longman. Marshall, I. 1983. Choice of grammatical word-class without global syntactic analysis. Computers and the Humanities 17: 139–150. Marshall, I. 1987. Tag selection using probabilistic methods. In The Computational Analysis of English: A Corpus-based Approach, R. Garside, G. Leech & G. Sampson (eds), 42–56. London: Longman. Mauranen, A. 2006. A rich domain of ELF – the ELFA Corpus of Academic Discourse. Nordic Journal of English Studies 5(2): 145–159. McEnery, T. & Wilson, A. 2001. Corpus Linguistics, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: EUP. Meunier, F. & Gouverneur, C. 2009. New types of corpora for new educational challenges: Collecting, annotating and exploiting a corpus of textbook material. In Corpora and Language



Frequency, corpora and language learning Teaching [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 33], K. Aijmer (ed.), 179–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mindt, D. 1996. English corpus linguistics and the foreign-language teaching syllabus. In Using Computer Corpora for Language Research: Studies in Honour of Geoffrey Leech, J. Thomas & M. Short (eds), 232–247. London: Longman. Moon, R. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach. Oxford: OUP. Nesselhauf, N. 2003. The use of collocations by advanced learners of English and some implications for teaching. Applied Linguistics 24(2): 223–242. Nesselhauf, N. 2005. Collocations in a Learner Corpus [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 14]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Römer, U. 2005. Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy. A Corpus-driven Approach to English Progressive Forms, Functions, Contexts and Didactics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Römer, U. & Schulze, R. (eds). 2009. Exploiting the Lexis-Grammar Interface [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 35]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sampson, G. 2007. Grammar without grammaticality. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3(1): 1–32, 111–129. Schmidt, R.W. 1990. The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics 11: 129–158. Schmidt, R.W. 1995. Consciousness and foreign language teaching: A tutorial on the role of attention and awareness in learning. In Attention and Awareness in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching, R.W. Schmidt (ed.), 1–63. Honolulu HI: University of Honolulu. Seidlhofer, B. 2004. Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24: 209–239. Sinclair, J. 1966. Beginning the study of lexis. In In Memory of J.R. Firth, C.E. Bazell, J.C. Catford, M.A.K. Halliday & R.H. Robins (eds), 410–430. London: Longman. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Sinclair, J., Jones, S. & Daley, R. 1970. English Lexical Studies: Report to OSTI on Project C/ LP/08. Ms, University of Birmingham 1970. Reprinted in Krishnamurthy (ed.) 2005. Stefanowitsch, A. & Gries, S.T. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209–243. Teubert, W. 2004. Units of meaning, parallel corpora, and their implications for language teaching. In Applied Linguistics: A Multidimensional Perspective, U. Connor & T.A. Upton (eds), 171–189. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Thomson, A.J. & Martinet, A.V. 1980 [1960]. A Practical English Grammar, 3rd edn. Oxford: OUP. Thorndike, E.L. 1921. Teacher’s Word Book. New York NY: Columbia Teachers College. Thorndike, E.L. 1932. A Teacher’s Word Book of 20,000 words. New York NY: Columbia Teachers College. Thorndike, E.L. & Lorge, I. 1944. The Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words. New York NY: Columbia Teachers College. Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Approach to Child Language. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. West, M. 1953. A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman. Zipf, G.K. 1935. The Psychobiology of Language. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. Zipf, G.K. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley.

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Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson1 This paper gives a glimpse of pre-corpus interlanguage studies, focusing on some Scandinavian research projects, before moving on to the development of computerized learner corpora and computer-aided interlanguage analysis with special reference to the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) project. Contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) is defined and discussed, followed by a presentation of the so-called Integrated Contrastive Model (ICM). The two models of analysis are illustrated by means of three case studies; two using CIA to study the use of quite and I would say across four learner groups in ICLE and one using the ICM to analyse seem in the interlanguage of Norwegian learners. Towards the end, some challenges for interlanguage research are discussed.

1. Introduction Learning a foreign language is a slow and, for most people, difficult process which rarely leads to full mastery. Even advanced language learners make mistakes and normally have a limited repertoire compared with native speakers of the target language. Problems may be linked to features of the target language, the learner’s first language or to the learning process itself. Revealing features of learner language, or interlanguage, has become an important means of surveying both obvious and more subtle differences between interlanguage and native speaker performance, and can potentially lead to improved language teaching as well as insights into the processes of language learning.

1. Stig Johansson sadly passed away before the article was finalized, but contributed substantially to the first submission of it and read and commented on a near-final version. The authors thank Bengt Altenberg for insightful comments on an early and a near-final version of this paper.

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2. Interlanguage studies before computer corpora In the 1940s and 1950s, linguists interested in language teaching emphasized the role of contrastive analysis, on the assumption that “in the comparison between native and foreign language lies the key to ease or difficulty in foreign language teaching” (Lado 1957: 1). The aim of the comparison was to identify both easy and difficult features of the language to be learnt. Lado considered that first language transfer in the foreign language might either help the learners or cause them to produce grammatical and lexical structures that deviate from the target norm (e.g. Lado 1957: 58). Observations of deviant features of learner language have probably always been made by language teachers, but it was not until about 50 years ago that they were subjected to systematic analysis. The 1960s and the early 1970s were the heyday of error analysis. Error analysis could be based on elicitation data and/or (pre-electronic) corpus data.2 Unlike contrastive analysis, error analysis is not restricted to interlingual transfer (Hammarberg 1973: 29). However, although Nickel (1973: 24) saw the “growing interest in error analysis [...] in connection with the efforts undertaken [...] to objectify measuring and grading of achievement in language testing”, it quickly became apparent that it was not sufficient to focus on errors, as pointed out in Hammarberg’s (1973) paper entitled “The insufficiency of error analysis”. At the same time, Enkvist (1973) put the question “Should we count errors or measure success?” Other perspectives on learner language were suggested: Levenston (1971) drew attention to overindulgence and under-representation in learner language, i.e. features which may not be overtly wrong but differ in e.g. style and register from the language of native speakers.3 One of the most important figures in the development of learner language research, Pit Corder, also pointed out that there are both overt and covert errors: overt errors produce linguistically unacceptable sentences, while “covertly erroneous sentences are those which are not appropriate in the context in which they occur” (Corder 1973: 272–3). More important, he stressed the significance of errors in providing a window into the learner’s mind; i.e. the study of a learner’s errors enables the researcher to “infer the nature of his knowledge at that point in his learning career and discover what he still has to learn” (ibid.: 257). Thus, the aim of the study is not only to map the errors, but represent the learner’s level of proficiency. Svartvik (1973: 8) takes a step further in suggesting that the term ‘error analysis’ should be replaced by the 2. Note that the term ‘corpus’ is used in this section to denote a “collection of naturally occurring examples of language [...] which has been collected for linguistic study” (Hunston 2002: 2). Nowadays, however, the term tends to imply that the corpus is “stored and accessed electronically” (ibid.). 3. Levenston relates over-indulgence and under-representation to contrastive analysis; learners are found (or predicted, in the case of learner groups other than Levenston’s own Hebrewspeaking students) to overindulge in “structures which closely resemble translation-equivalents in the mother tongue, or L1, to the exclusion of other structures (‘under-representation’) which are less like anything in L1” (1971: 115).



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more appropriate ‘performance analysis’: “Although the study of errors is a natural starting-point, the final analysis should include linguistic performance as a whole, not just deviation”.4 To illustrate features of these early studies of learner errors and learner performance, we will present a few investigations, chosen from the work of researchers in Scandinavia. The first two investigations were initiated within the context of the Swedish-English Contrastive Studies project directed by Jan Svartvik (see Svartvik 1973). While Thagg Fisher (1985) focuses on a grammatical problem, Linnarud (1986) is concerned with lexis. Finally we will outline a more large-scale Danish project that aimed at a comprehensive description of language learning as well as learner language. Thagg Fisher (1985) is a study of Swedish learners’ concord problems in English. Concord errors produced by Swedish learners, as found in three situations (essays, translations, and recorded speech), were excerpted and analysed. This material was supplemented by elicitation tests given to learners and native speakers. The outcome was a detailed account of the frequency of different types of concord errors, a comparison of the three situations, and an analysis of the major causes of concord difficulty. A hierarchy of concord error gravity was established, taking into account the behaviour of native speakers and their reactions to the learners’ errors. Besides pointing out difficult areas for Swedish learners, Thagg Fisher discovered conflicts between grammar/textbook norms and actual language use. An important finding was that concord ‘errors’ are not a matter of either/or, since there are ‘vague’ areas where the norms for concord depend on contextual factors such as medium and style (1985: 177ff.). There is thus a scale of error gravity implying varying degrees of irritation and negative evaluation by native speakers (see also Johansson 1978). Some errors were classified as ‘nativelike’, reflecting areas where native speaker usage may differ from the prescriptive norm, and ‘non-nativelike’ (Thagg Fisher 1985: 191), reflecting problems that are characteristic of learners and that are generally evaluated more negatively. Teaching should thus emphasize the latter type and de-emphasize the former. Pedagogical applications of the study also include improved descriptions of concord in English teaching materials. Linnarud’s (1986) investigation is a performance analysis of lexis in general, not just errors. The material consisted of English compositions written by Swedish 17year-old learners and a comparable group of native speakers of English. A number of quantitative measures were used, the most important of which were lexical individuality (lexical words unique to the writer), lexical sophistication (the number of less frequent words), lexical variation (type-token ratio), and lexical density (the proportion of lexical words in relation to the total number of words). The compositions were assessed by both Swedish L1 (i.e. first language) and English L1 evaluators. Not surprisingly, the native speaker group wrote longer texts and made fewer mistakes. There was a large difference in lexical individuality between the learner group and the native 4. The term which eventually became established was ‘interlanguage studies’, connected with Selinker’s (1972) term ‘interlanguage’.

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speakers, and a strong positive correlation with evaluations; lexical creativity was appreciated by all evaluators, but slightly more by the native speakers of English. Just as the native speakers used more unique words, they also used more rare words; there was thus a great difference between the two groups in lexical sophistication, but without a corresponding correlation with evaluations. Lexical variation was greater for the native speakers, but this measure turned out to be unsatisfactory as it was not adjusted for the length of the compositions. The native speaker essays also had a slightly higher lexical density, but no correlation was found with evaluations. Commenting on the findings, Linnarud stresses the importance of lexis in composition and makes a number of pedagogical recommendations for teaching vocabulary and grading compositions. In both areas the importance of communication and context are emphasized. Writing a composition is not primarily an exercise in using correct language, but a means of expressing ideas and communicating a message where lexical choice plays a crucial role (Linnarud 1986: 120). Although the studies by Thagg Fisher and Linnarud are very different in most respects, they are alike in the comparison of learner language with the language of native speakers. Both used text material combined with elicitation, and both were also very much concerned with pedagogical applications of their research. A much more comprehensive project was going on in Denmark around the same time, the Project In Foreign language pedagogy (PIF), one outcome of which was the book Learner Language and Language Learning (Færch et al. 1984). Many aspects of language learning and the study of language learning are discussed in the book, drawing on the corpus compiled for the project. This was an extensive collection of samples of the written and spoken English (including video-recordings) of more than a hundred Danes, ranging from the near-beginner (after one year of instruction) to the nearnative (higher education students) stage. The cross-sectional data allowed ‘pseudo-longitudinal’ studies of language learning (Færch et al. 1984: 297). Note this comment in the description of the corpus: With the one exception that the 12 learners at the lowest level did not provide written texts, each of these texts was elicited from all our informants. So as to hold as many factors constant as possible, learners with different ages, experience and personalities were given the same tasks. Most of these tasks were familiar from school, e.g. reading aloud and writing an essay, whereas the video-taped conversation was novel and represented an attempt to place the learner in a real communicative situation. (Færch et al. 1984: 295f.)

At that time, the PIF learner corpus was unique both in size and range and, most importantly, in the systematic way in which the corpus was developed. In a working paper Færch (1979) reported that the corpus of written learner language amounted to about 100,000 words and the corpus of spoken learner language to about 250,000



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words, and he presented plans for computerization of the material.5 Here we are very close to the stage of computer-aided analysis of learner language.

3. Learner computer corpora A significant step in interlanguage studies was the development of computerized learner corpora and computer-aided interlanguage analysis. Whereas earlier work was generally limited in scale and range, it now became possible to increase the size and variety of the material; and whereas the material used earlier rarely went beyond the individual researcher, the new electronic corpora could be developed as research tools to be used more generally by scholars in the field. The new technology and the research methods developed in corpus linguistics in general allowed new kinds of studies to be performed, for example with easier access and greater attention to frequency of occurrence and patterns of language use. Interest in learner corpora increased rapidly,6 to a great extent inspired by the work of Sylviane Granger and her team at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Université catholique de Louvain, which we will focus on below.7 In 1990 Sylviane Granger initiated a highly successful project to collect an International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), which inspired similar work in many other countries. The background was her interest in interlanguage studies and also a wish to extend English corpus research beyond native and second-language varieties of English, which were the focus of the International Corpus of English (ICE), initiated by Sidney Greenbaum (1991). Both ICE and ICLE should in turn be seen against the background of the development of ‘families’ of corpora within English corpus linguistics, i.e. corpora that are compiled according to the same design criteria and therefore lend themselves to comparative studies.8 Apart from the computerization of the material and the development of computational analysis tools, the main innovative aspect of ICLE is the systematic approach to corpus design and the compilation of comparable sub-corpora produced by learners

5.

The death of Claus Færch in 1987 hampered the further development of the PIF Project.

6. A detailed survey of learner corpora can be found in Pravec (2002). See also www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lcWorld.html. 7. See the website of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics: www.uclouvain.be/encecl.html. 8. The best-known of these ‘families’ is probably the ‘Brown family’, including the Brown Corpus, the LOB Corpus and their younger siblings FROWN and FLOB; see http://icame.uib.no/ newcd.htm.

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with a wide range of different mother-tongue backgrounds (e.g. Granger 1994, 1996).9 These make it possible to examine the extent to which learner language is mothertongue specific or reflects general language learning processes.

4. Contrastive interlanguage analysis A special feature of the ICLE project is that a framework for learner corpus research has been developed alongside the corpus. This is Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA), said to lie “at the core of the ICLE project” (Granger 1996: 43). Unlike contrastive analysis, which involves the linguistic comparison of (normally) two languages, CIA concerns varieties of the same language. It “involves quantitative and qualitative comparisons between native language and learner language (L1 vs. L2) and between different varieties of interlanguage (L2 vs. L2)” (Granger 2009: 18; see also Granger 1996). The former type of comparison thus presupposes a comparable corpus of native speaker (NS) data, whose role is to serve as a yardstick for measuring the extent to which L2 English differs from L1 English. As pointed out by Barlow (2005: 345), “a variety of issues arise” when “a learner corpus is to be contrasted with an NS corpus”, for example concerning regional variety and text type. In addition, the level of proficiency of the native speakers should be considered to avoid inadvertent comparisons between novice and professional writers (Granger 2002: 12). The solution to these issues within the ICLE project was the compilation of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), consisting of essays written by British and American students. ICLE and LOCNESS are relatively closely matched for text type (mostly argumentative writing) as well as writer age and experience. However, there is less information available on contributors in LOCNESS than in ICLE (age, sex, writing conditions, etc.). Furthermore, the LOCNESS texts are more heterogeneous as to essay topics as well as contributors (both university students and A-level pupils). This has caused many researchers to use only a sample of it, for instance by excluding A-level essays, or by using only US or only UK texts. Still, LOCNESS remains the best available comparable corpus to match ICLE and continues to be widely used. The extent to which an NS reference corpus is adequate for CIA is intimately connected with the aim of the comparison; cf. the discussions by Ädel (2006: 206) and Gilquin et al. (2007: 326 f.). From the point of view of descriptive linguistics, it is a clear advantage that the corpora can be closely matched on the most relevant variables, 9. The first edition of ICLE, released on CD-ROM in 2002, contained about 2.5 million words of English, chiefly argumentative essays written by university students representing 11 different mother-tongue backgrounds. In the second edition, ICLEv2, released in 2009, the number of sub-corpora has increased to 16, and the material has been enriched with analysis tools (see Granger et al. 2009).



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such as the age and level of expertise of the writers. From an English Language Teaching (ELT) perspective, however, a student corpus such as LOCNESS may be considered unsuitable as a reference corpus because it does not represent the desired target norm for proficiency or the type of language one would like to teach (cf. Leech 1998: xix f.). Thus, if the aim is to identify areas of argumentative or academic writing in which learners need to improve, an NS corpus consisting, for example, of press editorials or academic articles may be preferable. Comparing data from a learner corpus and an NS corpus enables the researcher to identify overuse, underuse and misuse in the English of the learners. As Granger has repeatedly emphasized (e.g. 1998a: 18), the terms over- and underuse are intended as neutral, quantitative measures of linguistic differences, not as qualitative judgements on interlanguage performance. Importantly, the study of overuse and underuse marks a widening of the scope of traditional error analysis as these phenomena, which are difficult to identify reliably other than by computational methods, often do not constitute errors. Rather, they reflect areas in which learner language differs from NS language in terms of frequency of distribution rather than correctness. For example, the expression kind of occurs 49 times per 100,000 words in the Norwegian sub-corpus of ICLE (ICLE-NO)10 and 12.3 times in LOCNESS. This shows clearly that the Norwegian learners overuse the expression. The question of whether or not they use it correctly, however, requires a qualitative investigation. Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis also includes the comparison of different nonnative-speaker (NNS) varieties. With ICLE, such comparisons are greatly facilitated by the common design of the sub-corpora, with control of a range of relevant variables (see Granger et al. 2009: 3ff.). For example, a comparison of the Norwegians’ use of kind of with that of their Swedish neighbours reveals that the Swedes overuse the expression almost as much as the Norwegians with 44.8 occurrences per 100,000 words. French learners overuse it even more, with 73.1 occurrences. In fact, kind of is universally overused across the sub-corpora of the second edition of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLEv2) (Granger et al. 2009), ranging from 29.1 (Tswana) to 138.5 occurrences per 100,000 words (Mandarin), which may be linked to the fact that the expression represents a way of making up for insufficiently nuanced vocabulary. Other lexicogrammatical items may be underused by some learner groups and overused by others. For example, French learners are known to overuse indeed in contrast to some other learner groups (Granger 2004: 135), such as Norwegians, who underuse it at 11.2 occurrences per 100,000 words vs. 17.9 in LOCNESS. The potential and usefulness of CIA have been demonstrated in a wide range of studies, as evidenced by e.g. Granger (1998c) and Granger et al. (2002). It should be noted that CIA is by no means restricted to the ICLE corpus or to English; the 10. The ICLE sub-corpora are referred to here by means of their tags in ICLE with the last two letters showing the L1 background of the learners (Norwegian, Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Hong Kong Chinese).

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methodology has been adopted by other researchers using interlanguage corpora of for instance German, Italian and Norwegian.11 Nor is it restricted to written language. Spoken learner language is being explored by means of, for example, the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI),12 compiled as a spoken counterpart of ICLE (Brand & Kämmerer 2006: 130) and comprising different L1 backgrounds and an NS reference corpus (ibid.: 134). Because the compilation of spoken corpora is costly in terms of time as well as money, the sub-corpora of LINDSEI are rather small (about 100,000 words). At present the completed sub-corpora represent 11 L1 backgrounds (Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and Swedish), but more teams are joining. Until very recently (2010), the corpus has not been publicly available outside the national project teams, and not all the sub-corpora have so far been used much in research. Hence the remainder of this chapter will continue to focus on the analysis of written corpora.

5. Some significant findings of CIA The availability of similar corpora with a common design as well as a common research model for investigating them has led to a number of important insights into advanced learner English. In this section we will present what we consider to be significant findings within the lexis, grammar and discourse of advanced learners of English (see also Hunston 2002: 206 ff.). Most of them come from studies of one or more non-native varieties compared to an NS corpus, usually LOCNESS. NNS vocabulary is found to be generally less varied than that of native speakers. According to Ringbom (1998), learners rely greatly on a relatively small vocabulary containing many words with a general meaning, such as people and thing. Similarly, Hasselgren (1994) observes that learners tend to overuse frequent words belonging to the core vocabulary at the expense of more precise synonyms, i.e. they cling to their ‘lexical teddy bears’, which is Hasselgren’s term for “the words they feel safe with” (ibid.: 237). Furthermore, learners tend to use a slightly greater number of recurrent word combinations than native speakers do (De Cock et al. 1998: 72 f.), and the frequently recurring word combinations are not always the same in L1 as in L2 English (cf. Wiktorsson [2003], who found that the prefabs used by Swedish learners were more informal than those of native speakers). Another common finding is that the written English of advanced learners is to a great extent influenced by informal spoken language. This shows up clearly in the use 11. For information on the FALKO corpus of learner German, the VALICO corpus of learner Italian and the ASK corpus of learner Norwegian, as well as other learner corpora, see www. uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lcWorld.html. 12. See www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lindsei.html.



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of features of interactiveness, such as first- and second-person pronouns and other signs of writer/reader visibility (Petch-Tyson 1998) and the high frequency of various modal expressions (Aijmer 2002) and questions (Virtanen 1998). In their study of connector use, Altenberg & Tapper (1998) found that Swedish learners tend to overuse informal connectors (such as sentence-initial and and but) at the expense of more formal connectors. Eia (2006) found the same tendency among Norwegian learners. Gilquin & Paquot (2008: 50) likewise found an overuse of sentence-initial and and but as well as other spoken-like features in learner writing. In addition to the influence of spoken English they suggest that this may be explained by L1 transfer (in the case of different style levels of otherwise equivalent expressions in the L1 and the L2), teaching-induced factors, and developmental factors (ibid.: 52 ff.). Interestingly, Ädel (2008) shows that the use of interactional features seems to depend on factors such as task setting and intertextuality; untimed essays written by students who used topical texts as a starting point for their discussion displayed far fewer interactional features than those in ICLE-SW, although written by Swedish students at the same stage of their studies. The claim that non-native written English borrows features from the spoken language should thus be treated with some caution. It should also be remembered that although learners may import features of spoken English into their writing, there are huge differences between real conversation and ICLE essays (see Gilquin & Paquot 2008). When learner writing is compared to spoken data, one finds that the ‘spoken’ features are relatively modestly represented in the NNS essays after all. A small indication of this is given in Table 1, in which the first four rows reproduce Petch-Tyson’s (1998: 112) figures for first- and second person pronouns in some sub-corpora of ICLE. The Swedish learners come across as most interactive in their writing; however, the pronouns are twice as frequent in the spoken dialogues in the British National Corpus (BNC). Table 1.╇ Use of first- and second-person reference across a number of corpora (based on Petch-Tyson [1998: 112] with added figures for Hong-Kong Chinese and the BNC) per 50,000 words Dutch L1 Finnish L1 French L1 Swedish L1 HK Chinese L1 BNC spoken dialogue BNC written (press editorials) US English (LOCNESS)

1,195 1,531 1,202 1,998 â•⁄â•‹449 3,973 â•⁄â•‹834 â•⁄â•‹449

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Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson

Petch-Tyson’s (1998) study of writer/reader visibility was carried out at a time when the ICLE corpus contained only Western L1 backgrounds. Interestingly, a corresponding investigation of the more recent Hong-Kong sub-corpus of ICLE (ICLE-HK) indicates that first- and second-person pronouns are not overused by Hong Kong learners (fifth row of Table 1). The difference between ICLE-HK and the other ICLE sub-corpora is likely to have cultural explanations. Returning to the issue of reference corpus, however, it is also noteworthy that the press editorials in the BNC have nearly twice as many first- and second-person references as the US section of LOCNESS (see Table 1), thus potentially reducing the degree of overuse by the European learners of English and suggesting underuse in the US and HK Chinese groups. The question of authorial presence has also been investigated by Hyland (2002), who compares the use of first-person reference in student reports to that of published journal articles within the same disciplines. Hyland finds that the student reports contain four times fewer references to first person than the journal articles do; i.e. the student reports have 10.1 references per 10,000 words and the published articles have 41.2 (ibid.: 1099). The findings are explained by reference to the students’ lack of authority in the field with a concurrent reluctance to assert themselves. This is backed up by the students’ own comments in interviews (ibid.: 1097). By comparison, ICLE-HK (cf. Table 1) contains about 90 first- and second-person pronouns per 10,000 words, of which the majority (81/10,000 words) are first-person. In other words, first-person reference is eight times more frequent in argumentative essays than in the reports examined by Hyland (2002), thus suggesting that the use of interactive features may vary with text type. A number of studies find that learners transfer syntactic patterns as well as discourse patterns from their L1 to their written English. For example, Osborne (2008) revealed strong L1 influence as regards the learners’ placement of adverbs; contrasts between language families could be clearly seen in the patterns found in the learner corpora. More specifically, the sequence V-Adv-O was overused by Romance L1 learners, underused by Germanic L1 learners and used with a frequency similar to that of the NS control corpus by a group consisting of Slavic and Finnish L1 learners (Osborne 2008: 134). Nesselhauf (2005: 242) found that L1 influence occurred in about half of the non-nativelike collocations identified in the German ICLE sub-corpus (ICLE-GE), which suggests that phraseological patterns are transferred in a similar manner to syntactic patterns. The transfer of L1 syntactic patterns into NNS English need not constitute errors, but may lead to an overuse of the pattern in question, possibly with unintended discourse effects. Boström Aronsson (2003), for example, found that Swedish learners overuse cleft constructions, which could to some extent be explained by analogy with Swedish style. The clefts are generally not ungrammatical, but according to Boström Aronsson (2003: 209), they may entail “unmotivated focus and emphasis, and implications of contrastiveness when there is none”. Extraposition was also found to be twice as frequent in ICLE-SW as in NS writing. As the construction often has an evaluative



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

function, its overuse is interpreted as “a tendency for NNS to foreground their opinions and evaluative comments” (Herriman & Boström Aronsson 2009: 109). Hasselgård (2009a) found equal overuse of extraposition in ICLE-NO. A later study (Hasselgård 2009b) showed that fronted time and space adverbials were overused in ICLE-NO compared to LOCNESS. The frequencies were, however, similar to those found in a collection of Norwegian NS argumentative essays. The fronted time and space adverbials in ICLE-NO furthermore had discourse functions more typical of Norwegian than of English (particularly as text organizers). A feature of learner language that is attributable to either learner strategies or lack of proficiency and/or register awareness (Altenberg 1997: 130) is the use of metadiscourse. Ädel (2006: 189) found that Swedish advanced learners used metadiscourse twice as often as American students, who in turn used it more often than British students. The overuse among learners concerned above all “personal metadiscourse” (ibid.: 190), i.e. items that refer directly to the writer and/or reader of the text. The functions of personal metadiscourse items are “to introduce the topic and to repeat (or review) some preceding discourse unit” (ibid.: 94), i.e. to negotiate the text as discourse between writer and reader. Such items may also be involved in definitions of terms and concepts (ibid.). The quantitative differences between the writer groups may be due to different writing conventions in the three cultures (ibid.: 154), but may also reflect the learners’ consciousness that they are writing in a foreign language. As mentioned above, most of the CIA studies carried out so far involve the comparison of native English to only one or two non-native varieties. Studies that involve a wider range of non-native varieties often make interesting observations, such as the scale of writer/reader visibility revealed by Petch-Tyson (1998: 112), the typological differences found by Osborne (2008), and the differences in the use of academic vocabulary observed by Paquot (2010). It is to be hoped that the greater cultural and linguistic variation in L1 background represented in the latest version of ICLE, along with the improved facilities for searching and analysing the corpus, will inspire more such studies.

6. From CIA to the integrated contrastive model Like the analysis of interlanguage, contrastive analysis has profited greatly by the development of corpus research methods. The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) was the first electronic bidirectional translation corpus of its kind (see Johansson 2007: 10 ff.). The model combines the idea of a translation corpus with that of a comparable corpus, i.e. one in which the original texts in both languages are matched for genre, publication date and size. This design allows the researcher to study translation correspondence in both directions of translation and to compare original and translated texts in the same language or original texts in different languages.



Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson

The method for contrastive analysis based on parallel corpora has lately been successfully paired with the CIA method; see Granger (1996) and Gilquin (2000/2001) on the Integrated Contrastive Model (ICM). This model offers a new dimension to interlanguage studies, enabling the researcher not only to differentiate general from L1-specific learner problems but also to explain and/or predict such problems on the basis of contrastive analyses of the L1 and the target language, in the spirit of the weak version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis (Wardhaugh 1970: 123). The link between learner corpus research and contrastive analysis is explored e.g. in Gilquin et al. (2008). The Integrated Contrastive Model is visualized in Figure 1.13 Granger (1996: 46) points out that “the model involves constant to-ing and fro-ing between CA [Contrastive Analysis] and CIA. CA data helps analysts to formulate predictions about interlanguage which can be checked against CIA data”. This part of the procedure follows the arrow marked “predictive” in Figure 1. In the opposite direction, deviations between learner language and native language can be explained (or ‘diagnosed’) by recourse to the contrastive analysis. The arrows pointing out of the figure were added by Gilquin (2000/2001: 100 f.) to show that not all errors can be explained by a contrastive analysis (see also Corder 1973: 288). The other change in Gilquin’s version of Granger’s (1996) diagram is the use of broken lines between CA and CIA to indicate a weaker connection between the two. CA

SL vs. TL EJBHOPTUJD

53"/4'&3

QSFEJDUJWF

OL vs. OL

CIA NL vs. IL

IL vs. IL

Figure 1.╇ The Integrated Contrastive Model (quoted from Gilquin 2000/2001: 100, based on Granger 1996: 47)

13. Key to the abbreviations found in Figure 1: CA = Contrastive Analysis; OL = Original Language; SL = Source Language; TL = Target Language; CIA = Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis; NL = Native Language; IL = InterLanguage.



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

The weak connection was also pointed out by Corder (1973: 229 ff.) who argued that differences between the native language and the foreign language need not produce learning difficulty. Differences between the native and the target language can also have unexpected effects on interlanguage, as demonstrated by Johansson & Stavestrand (1987). Since Norwegian does not have a grammaticalized progressive aspect, a natural assumption would be that Norwegian learners will have difficulties acquiring the progressive, and furthermore that they will underuse it. The investigation showed that the Norwegian learners indeed made a number of mistakes with the form. Curiously, most of the errors consisted in using the progressive where a simple form was required. Hence, the second prediction failed: the learners in fact overused the progressive. The overuse is believed to be caused by factors such as (intralingual) hypercorrection, overexposure in teaching and the simpler morphology of the progressive (i.e. only one form of the lexical verb needs to be mastered).

7. Case studies As an additional demonstration of contrastive interlanguage analysis, we will present two small-scale case studies based on ICLEv2, namely the use of the single lexical item quite and the phraseological item I would say. Four L1 groups have been selected: Norwegian, German, French and Spanish, thus representing two Germanic and two Romance L1 backgrounds. Texts have been identified on the basis of the learners’ first language, irrespective of home country. LOCNESS has been used for comparison. A third study makes use of the Integrated Contrastive Model in an investigation of seem in ICLE-NO against the background of a contrastive study based on the ENPC.

7.1

Quite

Granger (1998a and b) has drawn attention to the overuse of the all-round intensifier very at the expense of collocationally restricted -ly intensifiers such as closely or highly. Do we find a similar tendency for quite? Table 2 shows that quite is overused in all the learner groups but most markedly so among the Germans, followed at a distance by the Norwegians (both at significance levels of p < 0.01).14 The overuse of quite in ICLEGE ties in with the general overuse of adjective modification by German learners identified by Lorenz (1998: 57). In ICLE-FR and ICLE-SP, the overuse is less dramatic (significant at p < 0.05 for ICLE-FR, but less obviously so at p = 0.1 for ICLE-SP). The overall frequency distribution shown in Table 2 thus seems to reflect the

14. The ICLE frequencies were found using the statistics function on the ICLEv2 CD, while LOCNESS was analysed using the corpus tool AntConc (www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html). The frequencies from each ICLE sub-corpus and LOCNESS were compared using chi-square.



Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson

Table 2.╇ Quite across corpora: Raw frequencies and relative frequencies per 100,000 words Corpus ICLE-NO ICLE-GE ICLE-FR ICLE-SP LOCNESS

Occurrences

Rel. freq.

â•⁄ 92 147 â•⁄ 78 â•⁄ 63 â•⁄ 67

43.7 62.3 38.0 31.8 20.5

Germanic – Romance distinction. The question of how the learners use this word, however, can only be answered by studying concordance lines. The word quite can enter into a number of grammatical patterns, notably as: (i) modifier of adjective – quite safe; (ii) modifier of adverb – quite easily; (iii) modifier of predicate – never quite enter the big money fights; (iv) modifier of indefinite or quantified noun phrase – quite a remarkable feat, quite some time; (v) modifier of definite noun phrase/nominalized adjective – quite the opposite; (vi) modifier of prepositional phrase – quite by chance. Table 3 gives the relative frequencies of the different patterns across the corpora under study. Strikingly, the overuse of quite among German and Norwegian learners is visible across the patterns, while the French and Spanish learners differ from the native speakers mainly in the use of quite as a modifier of an adjective. Figure 2 shows the proportional distribution of the patterns across the corpora. The adjective modifier function of quite is most common in all the learner groups as well as in the NS corpus. However, the groups differ as to the use of other patterns: Spanish learners use other patterns very little, while Norwegian and German learners use quite for indefinite NP modification significantly more often than native speakers (p < 0.05) and also for adverb modification more often than native speakers though not at significant levels. French learners use other patterns more than the Spanish learners, but less than Norwegian and German learners. The adverb-modifying quite takes up a larger proportion in NS than in NNS writing, but as Table 3 shows, this pattern is actually more frequent in the learner corpora, except ICLE-SP. All other types are too rare to show reliable tendencies, but we may note that the category of ‘other’ (which includes cases of misuse) does not occur in LOCNESS. Table 3.╇ Patterns of quite across corpora, relative frequencies per 100,000 words

ICLE-NO ICLE-GE ICLE-FR ICLE-SP LOCNESS

+adj

+adv

+pred

+indef NP

+PP

+def NP

other

24.7 38.5 25.4 25.2 12.6

4.3 6.8 3.9 2.5 3.4

1.9 2.1 1.0 1.0 0.9

10.5 12.3 â•⁄ 5.9 â•⁄â•⁄â•‹0 â•⁄ 2.8

1.0 0.4 â•⁄â•‹0 0.5 0.6

1.0 2.1 0.5 1.0 0.3

0.5 â•⁄â•‹0 1.5 1.5 â•⁄â•‹0



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

ICLE-NO +adj +adv +pred + indef NP +PP +def NP other

ICLE-GE ICLE-FR ICLE-SP LOCNESS 0%

20 %

40 %

60 %

80 %

100 %

Figure 2.╇ Patterns of quite across corpora

The Spanish learners have the smallest extent of overuse, but at the same time differ most from native speakers in their use of quite. German learners, on the other hand, have a proportional distribution of patterns that does not differ much from that of the NS group in spite of the overuse shown in Tables 2 and 3. As noted above, Norwegian and German learners often use quite as a modifier of noun phrases. Examples are given in (1) – (3). (1) ... which now suddenly requires an education with quite a lot of theory.  (ICLE-NO) (2) ... reading my way through the book itself, which turned out to be quite an adventure given my poor standard of French. (ICLE-GE) (3) Stating that the time of dreaming and imagination is over is quite a sad statement. (ICLE-NO) Norwegian and German learners have a potential problem in placing the indefinite article between quite and a premodifying adjective, as in (3), since both Norwegian and German place the article before the equivalent of quite in a corresponding construction. The pattern seen in (2) and (3) must thus be a result of successful learning. The pattern ‘quite a(n) + adjective’ occurs 5 times in ICLE-NO; however ‘a quite + adjective’ is found 6 times. The corresponding figures for ICLE-GE are 9 vs. 8. Thus, both learner groups use the pattern of their L1 in about half the cases. Interestingly, a similar variation is found in LOCNESS. The pattern ‘a quite + adjective’, illustrated by (4), occurred twice while the other pattern occurred only once. However, in the BNC, the ‘quite a(n) + adjective’ pattern is clearly most frequent, with 27 instances per million words as against 5.6 for ‘a quite + adjective’.15

15. By comparison, the French learners had ‘quite a(n) + adjective’ 7 out of 11 times. The Spanish learners used quite with a premodified indefinite noun phrase only once, with the article preceding quite.



Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson



(4) One possible solution is a quite radical one. (LOCNESS) (5) Passengers whose life seems to revolve around annoying others – listening to not-quite-personal stereos, smoking in no smoking sections, ... (LOCNESS)

Example (5) shows a creative use of quite. No similar uses were found in the NNS corpora. However, a close examination of the NNS concordances for quite also shows some cases of dissonance (Hasselgren’s [1994] term for non-nativelike usage):

(6) Even in the text there are quite allusions to Pamela. (7) This kind of allusion is quite used in abstracts or introductions.

(ICLE-SP) (ICLE-SP)

The dissonance can be due to grammatical error as in (6), where quite modifies a bare noun phrase. In (7) the predicate is not one that can be modified for degree. Both cases of dissonance can possibly be explained as equivalence errors between quite and Spanish bastante, which carries much the same meaning as quite, but unlike quite can be used as a modifier of a noun or a participle verb.16 Similarly, there are examples from ICLE-FR where the dissonant use of quite is due to an equivalence error; in (8) this probably concerns quite/assez as well as changing/changeant. In (9) the collocation quite many is one that is not found in the BNC, but which may reflect the French expression (d’)assez nombreux. (8) Whereas political borders can be quite changing, cultural ones are not.  (ICLE-FR) (9) On a human level, I met quite many foreigners, but no Dutch people.  (ICLE-FR) German and Norwegian learners do not seem to have much difficulty with quite, probably due to the semantic and syntactic similarity with the nearest L1 equivalents ganz and ganske. A typical example of dissonance in these two sub-corpora is given in (10), where the dissonance is caused by a confusion between a good deal and quite a lot. In (11) the problem with the adjective modification is the context, i.e. the use of a ‘compromiser’ (Lorenz 1998: 56) where understatement does not seem intentional. (10) ... but the figures clearly show that men on the average earn quite a deal more than women here in Norway. (ICLE-NO) (11) ... and we had to spent nearly two, quite exiting years in the monster’s dungeon.  (ICLE-GE) This CIA study of quite yielded some interesting findings. First of all, the quantitative investigation showed overuse of quite in all four learner groups, though to different degrees. The overuse was most pronounced in ICLE-GE and least in ICLE-SP. However, a qualitative study showed that quite is not used in the same way in the five corpora examined. The Spanish learners use quite as a modifier of an adjective at the cost 16. Thanks to Magali Paquot and Maximino Jesus Ruiz Rufino for identifying the Spanish source of transfer.



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

of all other constructions, while the Germans and the Norwegians overuse it as a modifier of indefinite noun phrases. Finally, dissonant uses were studied. Most uses of quite are correct in all the corpora. However, the most serious cases of dissonance were found among the Spanish and French learners, possibly because the greater similarity between quite and its closest equivalent in the Germanic languages led to fewer problems among the German and Norwegian learners. The qualitative analysis thus uncovered problems in those learner groups that were quantitatively closer to native speaker usage.

7.2

I would say

In recent years, a great deal of research has focused on recurrent sequences in language, largely inspired by John Sinclair’s insightful work on collocations and his insistence on the importance of the ‘idiom principle’ (Sinclair 1991). Studies comparing learner and NS phraseology have shown important differences in this area (see e.g. Wiktorsson 2003; Meunier & Granger 2008). Hasselgård (2009a: 134) found that Norwegian learners overuse the string I would say. In ICLE-NO it typically functioned as an expression of stance, often prefacing a conclusion. In the native speaker data used for comparison (from the British component of the International Corpus of English, ICE-GB), the expression was found either in its literal sense or with the meaning of approximation. As a follow-up to this, we have studied the same expression across different learner groups and in LOCNESS. Table 4 shows Norwegian and French learners to have approximately the same degree of overuse, while the German and Spanish learners are closer to the distribution found in LOCNESS. Unlike the results for quite, the use of I would say does not reflect the Germanic – Romance distinction. Still, the use of the expression may be attributed to L1 transfer, or it may even be teaching-induced (some Norwegian textbooks list the expression as a possible turn of phrase in argumentation). Incidentally, the expression is mentioned by Granger (1998b: 156) as part of the learner’s (restricted) repertoire “for introducing arguments and points of view”. Table 4.╇ I would say across learner groups: Raw frequencies and relative frequencies per 100,000 words Corpus ICLE-NO ICLE-GE ICLE-FR ICLE-SP LOCNESS

Occurrences

Rel. freq.

27 10 23 â•⁄ 7 â•⁄ 5

12.8 â•⁄ 4.2 11.2 â•⁄ 3.5 â•⁄ 1.5



Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson

First we examined I would say in LOCNESS. Surprisingly it was found with functions not attested in ICE-GB (Hasselgård 2009a: 134), namely as a stance marker (12) and as an introduction to a conclusion (13). (12) ... and so in some ways I would say that he is of use to the party. (LOCNESS) (13) In conclusion, I would say that a single europe would lead to a damaging loss of sovereignty for Britain ... (LOCNESS) Both instances in LOCNESS of I would say as a stance marker have the function of signposting the following proposition as the speaker’s considered, but tentative opinion. As shown in (14), this use can also be identified in other NS material, such as the BNC. We may note that the meaning of say in example 14 (taken from the academic writing section of the corpus) is close to suggest. The fairly literal implication (i.e. the writer’s response to a question) seems typical of NS use of the expression. (14) So, what is to be done about sexism in language? I would say, whatever is most effective in making people think about the implications of the expressions they use. (BNC: CGF) In ICLE-FR I would say is by far most frequent (80–90%) as part of a conclusion. The expression is most often accompanied by phrases such as to conclude or in conclusion, as exemplified by (15). This conclusive use carries a higher degree of modal certainty than the tentative use illustrated by (12) and (14). The conclusive use of I would say in ICLE-FR is most likely related to similar expressions in French as illustrated in example (16).17 (15) To conclude with this whole debate, I would say that I can hardly find positive arguments to stand for the compulsory military service. (ICLE-FR) (16) En conclusion je dirais que ce baladeur m’a complètement séduit.  (www.iaddict.fr/ipod-shuffle.php) The Norwegian learners also use I would say in conclusions, but the stance marker use is about equally common. The latter typically occurs earlier on in the essay, prefacing a proposition that the writer is going to argue for. For example, (17) is the second sentence of an essay on ‘dreaming and imagination’. The expression can also have a meaning similar to ‘I think’, as shown by (18), and this use may be found anywhere in the text. (17) I would say that it is a statement close to the truth of today’s society, and in this essay I will give my opinions on the topic, and some reasons why this could be a fact. (ICLE-NO) 17. Google searches restricted to the domain .fr showed that je dirais often collocates with en conclusion or en somme. Interestingly, the one example of in conclusion I would say in the BNC comes from a school essay.



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis

(18) There is a vast difference between speeding and intentionally murdering another human being. In this first case I would say that punishment is just right, by removal of the driver’s license for a period of time ... (ICLE-NO) A formal difference between I would say and its closest Norwegian equivalent jeg vil si (lit: ‘I will say’) is that the Norwegian modal vil has the present tense form, which is a potential source of transfer errors. However, the expression I will say occurs only three times in ICLE-NO. It signals either stance or conclusion, as shown by (19), which occurs towards the end of a text. (19) Anyway, from my point of view, I will say there is a great space for both dreaming and imaginations in our lives. (ICLE-NO) The Norwegian expression is fairly close to ‘from my point of view’, i.e. it flags the following proposition as the speaker’s opinion, but not necessarily as tentative. In English, however, the past-tense form of the modal gives the expression I would say a tentative ring (e.g. Biber et al. 1999: 496). It is thus possible that the Norwegian learners, through L1 transfer, invest the English expression with a higher degree of assertiveness than it seems to have in NS usage. The German learners use I would say mostly to express stance, but also in a more literal sense as a metatextual device (Ädel 2006); in (20) the writer simply explains how s/he would answer a question. There are also a few cases of I would say in conclusions, as in (21). (20) Well, what is best for them, what is it they love? I would say: sitting on their mothers’ or fathers’ lap while being told a story ... (ICLE-GE) (21) On balance, I would say that corporal punishment is no appropriate means to fight against criminality. (ICLE-GE) In example (22), from ICLE-SP, I would say has a slightly different metatextual function, namely that of commenting on the use of a word, while (23) shows the expression of stance. These are the main uses of I would say in ICLE-SP, and the Spanish learners use them about equally often. (22) The recruit spends (“wastes” I would say) almost a year of his life (nine month is the average in Europe) doing nothing except ... (ICLE-SP) (23) First of all I would say that love was completely under the social convections and prejudice, ... (ICLE-SP) This investigation has shown clear overuse of I would say by Norwegian and French learners. The overuse can probably be explained in both cases by the existence of similar expressions in the learner’s L1. The qualitative study shows that the learners use the expression for different functions: the conclusive use is most frequent in ICLE-FR, where the expression often collocates with conclude, sum up or similar words. A plausible explanation for the overuse of this function is the frequent collocation in French





Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson

of je dirais with expressions such as en conclusion. As for the Norwegian learners, we suggested that they overuse the expression in conclusions because of the different degree of modal certainty carried by the Norwegian cognate expression. The conclusive use is absent from the ICE-GB material used by Hasselgård (2009a), but is found in LOCNESS. Yet, the phraseology of I would say in native speaker material suggests a lower degree of assertiveness than would normally be desirable in the conclusion to a line of argumentation. It is thus possible that conclusive I would say is related not just to L1 influence but also to developmental factors or to (lack of) speaker authority, though this is a point that needs further study. The stance-marker function of I would say is found in all the corpora, though it dominates most in ICLE-GE and ICLE-SP. The metatextual function would seem to constitute a relatively simple way of marking a rhetorical structure of question and answer in the text, and may thus be a feature of novice writing. Phraseological usage clearly depends on style and register and consequently reflects the proficiency level and writing experience of the writers. For this reason a reference corpus of ‘expert’ writing might usefully complement the NS student corpus. Furthermore, the study of the phraseology of learner language shows very clearly that contrastive interlanguage analysis would profit vastly from being supplemented by a contrastive analysis of the learner’s first language and the target language.18

7.3

A Norwegian perspective on seem

To give an example of how the Integrated Contrastive Model can work, we will take as our starting point Johansson’s (2007: 117 ff.) analysis of seem and its Norwegian correspondences in the ENPC and supplement this with an investigation of seem in ICLENO and LOCNESS. Johansson’s study was triggered by the observation that seem “sometimes seems to disappear without a trace in translations into Norwegian and likewise may be added, seemingly without any motivation, by English translators” (ibid.). Seem indeed turned out to be much more frequent in English originals than in translations (145.8 vs. 100.5 occurrences per 100,000 words). When comparing the English constructions with seem to their Norwegian correspondences, Johansson found that (i) English catenative constructions are strikingly more common than the corresponding syntactic choice in Norwegian; (ii) copula constructions are far more common in English than in Norwegian; those with a noun phrase complement are found in English only; (iii) English clauses with dummy subject it or there + seem(s) are less common than the corresponding Norwegian structures with the dummy subject det; (iv) an experiencer is more commonly expressed in Norwegian than in English; and (v) Norwegian uses more comparative structures, particularly with som (‘as (if)’, ‘like’) (2007: 123 and 138).

18. For a good example, see Paquot (2008).



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

Apart from the expectation that seem will be underused, these findings give rise to the following predictions for ICLE-NO compared to LOCNESS: (i) catenative seem will be underused; (ii) copular patterns will be underused, especially those with a noun phrase complement; (iii) a dummy subject will be used more often by the Norwegian learners; (iv) an experiencer will be expressed more often by the Norwegian learners; and (v) comparative structures will show up more often in the context of seem. The overall expectation is in fact not met: ICLE-NO has a higher frequency of seem per 100,000 words than LOCNESS (117 vs. 90). Even more surprisingly, the catenative function accounts for a slightly higher proportion of the occurrences of seem in ICLE-NO (51%) than in LOCNESS (47.5%). On the other hand, the copular function is, as predicted, more common in LOCNESS, with a proportion of 35.5%, compared to 28% of the occurrences of seem in ICLE-NO. The third prediction is partly met; in ICLE-NO, 31.5% of the occurrences of seem collocate with the dummy subject it, as against 23% in LOCNESS. Existential there, however, is more common with seem in LOCNESS (6 vs. 3 occurrences) but these figures are too low to reveal patterns. The predicted overuse of comparative structures is also to some extent confirmed. In any case the collocations seem like and seem as if are about twice as common in ICLE-NO as in LOCNESS. Finally, explicit experiencers are almost twice as common in ICLE-NO as in LOCNESS, which was expected on the basis of the contrastive study. An example is given in (24). (24) The oral examinaton seems to me to be more of a test in how to tackle stress ...  (ICLE-NO) To dig further into the (mis-)match between the predictions based on Johansson’s contrastive study and the evidence from ICLE-NO we need to take a closer look at the learner data. First, the overuse of seem must be seen in connection with the general overuse of modal and hedging expressions in learner data, as shown by Aijmer (2002). Though not a modal auxiliary, seem clearly has modal meanings, particularly of evidentiality, and is thus handy for writers who want to hedge their claims. The unexpected overuse of catenative seem may take place at the expense of copular seem, as the most common lexical verb following catenative seem in ICLE-NO is be, often with a copular function, as seen in (25). By contrast, in (26) the predicative follows seem directly, without the aid of copular be. Admittedly, be is the most frequent verb following catenative seem in LOCNESS too, but it is more predominant in ICLENO (41.5% vs. 33% of all occurrences of catenative seem). It is thus likely that the Norwegian learners add be by analogy with corresponding Norwegian constructions (cf. Johansson 2007: 120). (25) The characters seem to be able to come to terms with Willie Loman’s death.  (ICLE-NO) (26) This idea does not seem acceptable to the British public. (LOCNESS)



Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson

The high frequency of dummy it in clauses with seem might be expected from the more general tendency of Norwegian to prefer light sentence openings (Hasselgård 2005). The dummy subject typically refers forward to a clause in extraposition. Interestingly, the Norwegian learners use the conjunction like more often than the more formal that in the extraposed clauses, as in (27). This may be due to the frequent use of som (‘as’, ‘like’) found in a number of Norwegian correspondences of seem in Johansson (2007). The learners also use the subordinator as if much more often than the native speakers (11 vs. 3 occurrences), no doubt influenced by the Norwegian equivalent som om illustrated in (28). (27) To me it seemed like some of the teachers had never been teaching school children (ICLE-NO) (28) ... but it seems you also know that if that happens it would be just as easily finished. (ENPC: ABR1) ... men det virker som om du også vet at hvis det skjer, kan det avsluttes like lett. (ABR1T) [lit: but it seems as if ...] In (28) som om corresponds to as if. However, om can be omitted in this construction, which is probably the cause of some dissonant occurrences like (29), where as is not followed by if. This type of dissonance can thus be explained by reference to the learner’s L1. (29) It might seem as it will cost a lot in the beginning ...

(ICLE-NO)

The frequent expression of experiencers with seem in ICLE-NO, illustrated by (24) above, correlates with the general tendency to writer/reader visibility in learner texts (Petch-Tyson 1998), as the most common realization of the experiencer is to me. The native speakers use seem(s) to me in 7 out of 14 experiencer phrases, but the Norwegian learners use it in 14 out of 22, and in addition three of the remaining cases have an experiencer that includes the speaker, e.g. many of us. The tendency to overuse experiencer phrases may thus have two explanations; the more frequent expression of an experiencer in Norwegian and/or the learners’ inclination to be visible in their texts. Further exploration of other sub-corpora of ICLE is needed to check which of the explanations is more plausible. This case study has illustrated that the connection between learner data and contrastive data is far from straightforward. As discussed by Gilquin (2008), even features of learner language that may be attributed to L1 transfer on the basis of a contrastive analysis may in fact have other causes. In the study of seem it seems that the overuse of the word is related to the general overuse of modal markers by learners of English. The expression of experiencers may be either L1-related or due to the tendency for learners to use colloquialisms in their written texts (e.g. Altenberg & Tapper 1998). The preference of like to that in subordinate clauses may likewise have two explanations. However, the overuse of it as a dummy subject and the occasional omission of if in as if are very likely caused by L1 transfer.



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

It should be noted that the ICM, with the parallel corpora available, suffers from a mismatch of genres and/or writer proficiency. The ENPC consists of fictional and nonfictional texts. None of them are argumentative or academic (with the possible exception of a few popular science texts) and all are produced by professional writers and translators. Thus, an ICM analysis based on a corpus such as the ENPC should ideally be checked against a (monolingual) corpus of student writing in the learner’s L1 to control for genre and writer variables. The contrastive analysis based on ‘OL vs. OL’ in Figure 1 above might thus include a comparison of comparable monolingual corpora of student writing.

8. Some challenges Granger has often discussed (e.g. Granger 2004: 134; Granger 2009: 14) the challenge of translating findings from CIA studies into pedagogical issues and EFL practice (see also Hunston 2002: 208). On the one hand, CIA studies usually outline potential pedagogical implications of the investigation, typically measures that will bring the learners closer to NS performance; on the other these measures are not necessarily directly translatable to classroom practice. In any case, the recommendations should probably to a greater extent take proper account of the reference corpus used as well as learner needs and teaching objectives (Granger 2009: 22). As pointed out by Ädel (2006: 206), “if we take it for granted that learners aim to achieve as professional a style of writing as possible, we should not make recommendations to learners based on native-speaker student usage, but rather should use professional native-speaker writing as the target”. For example, if compared to LOCNESS, Norwegian advanced learners underuse the connector however, even at a frequency of 66 per 100,000 words (N = 139), since LOCNESS has 181 instances per 100,000 words (N = 591). But a change of reference corpus alters the picture dramatically. The press editorials in the BNC, for example, have 58 occurrences of however per 100,000 words. We may thus wonder whether the Norwegian learners really underuse the word, or whether it is the LOCNESS writers who overuse it. In some cases of underuse, EFL teaching might focus on the underused items, though at the risk of inducing overuse instead. In the case of overused items, as noted by Hunston (2002: 209), there may be little point in saying “Use thing less often” without knowing what the relevant alternatives would be in specific contexts. The example of however given above also illustrates that the concepts of overuse and underuse are not straightforward, and quantitative findings need to be carefully considered and cross-checked with qualitative analyses before exposing learners to them.19 This is, 19. In fact, Granger (2009: 22) points out that “features of learner language uncovered by L[earner] C[orpus] research need not necessarily lead to targeted action in the classroom”. This will depend on the degree of divergence between learner and native speaker usage as well as on learner needs.

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however, not to deny the immense value of quantitative studies based on the CIA method and the ICLE corpus collection, but researchers should keep their eyes open for alternative reference corpora and external causes for some of the findings; cf. Ädel (2008) and Gilquin & Paquot (2008). Another important challenge concerns genre, as Biber et al. (1999) convincingly demonstrate that grammar depends on register. Studies of advanced learner language often suggest that learners are unaware of genre requirements (e.g. Altenberg 1997, Gilquin & Paquot 2008), and that this may be part of the explanation for the general overuse of informal and spoken-like features. This may well be true. However, the comparison of Hyland’s (2002) study of scientific reports written in English by Hong Kong learners with the figures for ICLE-HK (see Table 1 above) may indicate that learners of English can adapt their style to different registers. The challenge for CIA is thus to expand its empirical base to include more registers. This work has been started with the ongoing compilation of a new international learner corpus, the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA). With this corpus alongside ICLE and LINDSEI it will be possible to extend the field of CIA into studies of genre, medium and style. Finally, the study of corpora such as ICLE and LINDSEI can give invaluable insights into the interlanguage of learners at a particular proficiency level. However, such corpora cannot reveal much about language learning. For example, dummy it is not often used instead of existential there in ICLE-NO even though this is a well-known learning problem for Norwegians (cf. Hasselgård 2009a). When do learners begin to keep the two constructions apart? At what stage do learners whose native language does not have a grammaticalized progressive start overusing the form in English (cf. Johansson & Stavestrand 1987)? When do learners acquire syntactic patterns that are different from those of their own native tongue, and by what steps? To answer such questions, we need data representing different stages of the learning process, from beginners to advanced learners, for instance along the lines of the Danish PIF project (Færch et al. 1984). Hopefully, the new Longitudinal Database of Learner English (LONGDALE) project will bring corpus-linguistic studies closer to the language learning process.20

9. The revolution continues About twenty years after the ICLE project was conceived, the achievement seems immense. This applies not just to the important work done by Sylviane Granger and her team at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics. No less important is the enthusiasm which has spread to many countries across the world (a good overview is given at 20. For information on the VESPA and the LONGDALE projects, see www.uclouvain.be/encecl-vespa.html and www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-longdale.html, respectively.



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 

www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lcWorld.html). The study of learner corpora is now an established field of applied linguistics. But it is a field which keeps evolving; new projects emerge, and thereby the potential for renewed research procedures, more sophisticated corpus tools, new types of investigations and new applications. An important example of the recognition of interlanguage research is the ICLE-based contribution of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics to the Macmillan Dictionary (Rundell 2007). ‘Get-it-right’ boxes as well as a section entitled “Improve your writing skills” are advertised as key features of the dictionary.21 One of the earliest articles presenting the ICLE project, Granger (1994), carries the title “The Learner Corpus: A revolution in applied linguistics”. It has indeed been revolutionary in the sense that it has opened up a whole range of new research questions. Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis has turned out to be a fruitful paradigm. And yet there were significant studies of learner language preceding ICLE. At the outset of our paper we drew attention to some early work in Scandinavia. A hallmark of these studies is the concern with pedagogical applications (Thagg Fisher 1985; Linnarud 1986) and with issues of language learning (Færch et al. 1984). What they lacked was the comparison across different mother-tongue groups. In contrast, the CIA paradigm includes both learner vs. native speaker comparison and the possibility of comparing across groups of learners with different mother-tongue backgrounds. Moreover, the Integrated Contrastive Model has a great advantage over earlier error analysis and contrastive studies undertaken previously for purposes of improving language teaching: the combined resources inherent in the model secure a much better basis for explaining errors as well as making and testing predictions of learning difficulties. In spite of the wealth of studies, Granger (2009: 14) admits that “learner corpus research has not yet fully realized its stated ambition as its links with SLA have been somewhat weak and it has given rise to relatively few concrete pedagogical applications”. But the potential is definitely there, and Granger points out some important directions to go. If these are followed, the future seems bright for foreign-language pedagogy and for understanding interlanguage and the processes of foreign language acquisition.

References Ädel, A. 2006. Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 24] Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ädel, A. 2008. Involvement features in writing: do time and interaction trump register awareness? In Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research, G. Gilquin, S. Papp & M.B. Díez-Bedmar (eds), 35–53. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Aijmer, K. 2002. Modality in advanced Swedish learner’ written interlanguage. In Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Learning [Language 21. See www.macmillandictionaries.com/about/MED2/keyfeatures.htm.

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Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson Learning & Language Teaching 6], S. Granger, J. Hung & S. Petch-Tyson, S. (eds), 55–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Aijmer, K. (ed.). 2009. Corpora and Language Teaching [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 33]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Altenberg, B. 1997. Exploring the Swedish component of the International Corpus of Learner English. In Proceedings of PALC’97 Practical Applications in Language Corpora (Lódz, 10–14 April 1997), B. Lewandowska-Tomaszcyk & P.J. Melia (eds), 119–132. Lódz: Lódz University Press. Altenberg, B. & Tapper, M. 1998. The use of adverbial connectors in advanced Swedish learners’ written English. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 80–93. London: Longman. Barlow, M. 2005. Computer-based analyses of learner language. In Analysing Learner Language, R. Ellis & G. Barkhuizen (eds), 335–357. Oxford: OUP. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Boström Aronsson, M. 2003. On clefts and information structure in Swedish EFL writing. In Extending the Scope of Corpus-based Research. New Applications, New Challenges, S. Granger & S. Petch-Tyson (eds), 197–210. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brand C. & Kämmerer, S. 2006. The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI): Compiling the German component. In Corpus Technology and Language Pedagogy, S. Braun, K. Kohn, & J. Mukherjee (eds), 127–140. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Corder, S.P. 1973. Introducing Applied Linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. De Cock, S., Granger, S., Leech, G., & McEnery, T. 1998. An automated approach to the phrasicon of EFL learners. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 67–79. London: Longman. Eia, A.-B. 2006. The use of linking adverbials in Norwegian advanced learners’ written English. MA thesis, University of Oslo. Enkvist, N.E. 1973. Should we count errors or measure success? In Errata: Papers in error analysis, J. Svartvik (ed.), 16–23. Lund: Gleerup/Liber. Færch, C. 1979. Computational analysis of the PIF Corpus of learner language. PIF Working Papers 1, 2nd rev. version. Department of English, University of Copenhagen. Færch, C., Haastrup, K. & Phillipson, R. 1984. Learner Language and Language Learning. Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag A.S. & Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gilquin, G. 2000/2001. The Integrated Contrastive Model: Spicing up your data. Languages in Contrast 3(1): 95–124. (Printed in 2003). Gilquin, G. 2008. Combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis to apprehend transfer: detection, explanation, evaluation. In Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research, G. Gilquin, S. Papp & M.B. Díez-Bedmar (eds), 3–34. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gilquin G., Granger S. & Paquot M. 2007. Learner corpora: The missing link in EAP pedagogy. In Corpus-based EAP Pedagogy, P. Thompson (ed.). Special issue of Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6(4): 319–335. Gilquin, G., Papp, S. & Díez-Bedmar, M.B. (eds). 2008. Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gilquin, G. & Paquot, M. 2008. Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction 1(1): 41–61. Granger, S. 1994. The Learner Corpus: A revolution in applied linguistics. English Today 10(3): 25–32.



Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis  Granger, S. 1996. From CA to CIA and back: An integrated approach to computerized bilingual and learner corpora. In Languages in Contrast. Papers from a Symposium on Text-based Cross-linguistic Studies, Lund 4–5 March 1994 [Lund Studies in English 88], K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg, & M. Johansson (eds), 37–51. Lund: Lund University Press. Granger, S. 1998a. The computer learner corpus: A versatile new source of data for SLA research. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 3–18. London: Longman. Granger, S. 1998b. Prefabricated patterns in EFL writing. In Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, A.P. Cowie (ed.), 145–160. Oxford: OUP. Granger, S. (ed.). 1998c. Learner English on Computer. London: Longman. Granger, S. 2002. A bird’s-eye view of learner corpus research. In Granger, Hung & Petch-Tyson (eds), 3–33. Granger, S. 2004. Computer learner corpus research: current status and future prospects. In Applied Corpus Linguistics: A Multidimensional Perspective, U. Connor & T. Upton (eds), 123–145. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Granger, S. 2009. The contribution of learner corpora to second language acquisition and foreign language teaching: A critical evaluation. In Aijmer (ed.), 13–32. Granger, S., Hung, J. & Petch-Tyson, S. (eds). 2002. Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Learning [Language Learning & Language Teaching 6]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Granger, S., Dagneaux, E., Meunier, F. & Paquot, M. (eds). 2009. International Corpus of Learner English. Version 2. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Greenbaum, S. 1991. The development of the International Corpus of English. In English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik, K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg (eds), 83–91. London: Longman. Hammarberg, B. 1973. The insufficiency of error analysis. In Errata: Papers in error analysis, J. Svartvik (ed.), 29–36. Lund: Gleerup/Liber. Hasselgård, H. 2005. Theme in Norwegian. In Semiotics from the North: Nordic Approaches to Systemic Functional Linguistics, K. L. Berge & E. Maagerø (eds), 35–48. Oslo: Novus. Hasselgård, H. 2009a. Thematic choice and expressions of stance in English argumentative texts by Norwegian learners. In Aijmer (ed.), 121–139. Hasselgård, H. 2009b. Temporal and spatial structuring in English and Norwegian student essays. In Corpora and Discourse – and Stuff. Papers in Honour of Karin Aijmer. R. Bowen, M. Mobärg, & S. Ohlander (eds), 93–104. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Hasselgren, A. 1994. Lexical teddy bears and advanced learners: A study into the ways Norwegian students cope with English vocabulary. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 4: 237–259. Herriman, J. and Boström Aronsson, M. 2009. Themes in Swedish advanced learners’ writing in English. In Aijmer (ed.), 101–120. Hunston, S. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. Hyland, K. 2002. Authority and invisibility: authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1091–1112. Johansson, S. 1978. Studies of Error Gravity. Native Reactions to Errors Produced by Swedish learners of English. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Johansson, S. 2007. Seeing through Multilingual Corpora: On the Use of Corpora in Contrastive Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 26]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johansson, S. & Stavestrand, H. 1987. Problems in learning – and teaching – the progressive form. In Proceedings from the Third Nordic Conference for English Studies [Stockholm

 Hilde Hasselgård and Stig Johansson Studies in English 73(1)], I. Lindblad & M. Ljung (eds), 139–148. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Lado, R. 1957 [1971]. Linguistics across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Leech, G. 1998. Preface. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), xiv-xx. London: Longman. Levenston, E. A. 1971. Overindulgence and underrepresentation – Aspects of mother tongue interference. In Contrastive Linguistics, G. Nickel (ed.), 115–121. Cambridge: CUP. Linnarud, M. 1986. Lexis in Composition: A Performance Analysis of Swedish Learners’ Written English [Lund Studies in English 74]. Lund: Gleerup/Liber. Lorenz, G. 1998. Overstatement in advanced learners’ writing: Stylistic aspects of adjective intensification. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 53–66. London: Longman. Meunier, F. & Granger, S. (eds). 2008. Phraseology in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nesselhauf, N. 2005. Collocations in a Learner Corpus [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 14]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nickel, G. 1973. Aspects of error evaluation and grading. In Errata: Papers in Error Analysis, J. Svartvik (ed.), 24–28. Lund: Gleerup/Liber. Osborne, J. 2008. Adverb placement in post-intermediate learner English: A contrastive study of learner corpora. In Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research, G. Gilquin, S. Papp & M.B. Díez-Bedmar (eds), 127–146. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Paquot M. 2008. Exemplification in learner writing: A cross-linguistic perspective. In Phraseology in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching, F. Meunier & S. Granger (eds), 101–119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Paquot, M. 2010. Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing. From Extraction to Analysis. London: Continuum. Petch-Tyson, S. 1998. Writer/reader visibility in EFL written discourse. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 107–118. London: Longman. Pravec, N. A. 2002. Survey of learner corpora. ICAME Journal 26: 81–114. Ringbom, H. 1998. Vocabulary frequencies in advanced learner English: A cross-linguistic approach. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 41–52. London: Longman. Rundell, M. (Editor in chief) 2007. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2nd edn. Oxford: Macmillan Education. Selinker, L. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10(3): 219–231. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Svartvik, J. (ed.). 1973. Errata: Papers in Error Analysis. Lund: Gleerup/Liber. Thagg Fisher, U. 1985. The Sweet Sound of Concord: A Study of Swedish Learners’ Concord Problems in English [Lund Studies in English 73]. Lund: Gleerup/Liber. Virtanen, T. 1998. Direct questions in argumentative student writing. In Learner English on Computer, S. Granger (ed.), 94–106. London: Longman. Wardhaugh, R. 1970. The contrastive analysis hypothesis. TESOL Quarterly 4(2): 123–130. Wiktorsson, M. 2003. Learning Idiomaticity. A Corpus-Based Study of Idiomatic Expressions in Learners’ Written Production [Lund Studies in English 105]. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.



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Corpora used in examples and case studies British National Corpus (BNC) <www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/> English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) <www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/enpc/> International Corpus of English, British Component (ICE-GB) <www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ projects/ice-gb/> International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) <www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-icle.html> Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) <www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-locness.html>

The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce Since Erasmus exchanges have fostered student mobility in the European Union, various features of argumentation skills for Academic English (AE) have become central elements of university curricula. This chapter presents an analysis of a small corpus of texts written in an academic writing (AW) class by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Spanish university students at B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR). The small corpus data is contrasted with the Spanish sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (SPICLE) regarding the use of certain devices for intertextuality and evaluation. The study shows that students who have been given very definite CEFR guidelines regarding the use of specific academic features are able to improve their writing, even though there remain certain types of errors in their overall lexico-grammatical production.

1. Introduction Given the increasing student mobility within the European Union, skill in the critical argumentation indispensable for academic writing (AW) in English has become an essential competency. This development within institutions of higher education is reflected in the manual called Relating Language Examinations to the Common European Framework of References for Languages, published in 2009 by the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe. On various pages (pp. 44, 138, 177), this document addresses the question of two text types which are essential for academic work: descriptive-chronological text (as in lab reports) and argumentative text type (essential in all academic disciplines, at least for many sections of an academic report or research article). To the Appendix on ‘Written assessment criteria’ (Table C4, p. 187) of this document, the Language Policy Division has attached additional columns for these two text types. The specifications list features of argumentative AW, such as the ability to present a case; provide a critical appreciation of proposals; expand and support a point of view with subsidiary points, reasons and examples and provide an appropriate reader-friendly logical structure. If these characteristics constitute what

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university students’ writing will be judged on, then it is crucial that university teachers analyse academic writing in the different disciplines in order to ascertain what these features, which include a mixture of structural and rhetorical patterns, are and how they could be best taught. That is, these general Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) features do not specify the linguistic realizations that AW requires and therefore, these must be identified and incorporated into can do statements for writing syllabi.1 In this chapter, we focus on a series of lexical choices which enter into grammar patterns and their pragmatic associations2 – so often the focus of the work of Sylviane Granger (Granger 1983; Granger 1998a; Granger 1998b; Gilquin et al. 2007; Meunier & Granger 2008) – in order to show how the elaboration of can do statements for a one-semester academic writing course can improve student writing (and reading skills) in terms of the students’ communicative goals, if not their syntactic competency. The use of these lexical items are traced through two corpora: the Spanish sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (SPICLE), a collection of texts produced by Spanish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students with no specific training in AW, as compared to a corpus consisting of texts written by similar students as part of a course in AW. The purpose of the various comparisons was to ascertain whether the syllabus for the two AW courses (2007–2008 and 2008–2009) was actually beneficial to the students’ literacy growth in the production of texts.3 Therefore, the study focuses more on the students’ text production than on the readings used as models during the course. In both of the years of the AW course, the ultimate aim of the study was pedagogical, i.e. revising the syllabus and thus classroom practices. The study shows that, while instructors of an AW course cannot hope to significantly improve their students’ grammatical competence over a one-semester period, by providing explicit descriptors for argumentative writing, they are able to help the students understand the dialogic nature of argumentation. The attention given to the frequency of different features of argumentation and the ways in which these combine shows students how to produce more sophisticated texts. Furthermore, the study also illustrates how small corpora can be usefully employed both to trace learners’ developmental patterns and subsequently adapt specific classroom teaching practices (Thompson 2001a). 1. This study forms part of the work completed for a national project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2008–03968). 2. Following Hoey (2005: 43), we define pragmatic association as the particular pragmatic function(s) that words and nested combinations of words are primed for because of frequent use, such as as can be seen in Table 2 as a discourse marker for presenting information. Also see Hunston & Francis (1999). 3. No attempt was made to measure the improvement (or not) of the students’ reading competency.



The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 

2. The development of academic literacies in an EFL context According to Johns (1997: 2), literacy is an inclusive term which refers to both reading and writing, and also “encompasses ways of knowing particular content, languages and practices”, including strategies to deal with “understanding, discussing, organizing and producing texts”. As many researchers have noted (Bazerman 1994; Johns 1997; Bhatia 2004), the development of academic literacy in particular disciplines depends on the students’ having become aware of the requirements of the genre in question – giving rise to what Hoey refers to as “productive priming” (Hoey 2005: 11) – and also being conscious of the socio-cultural forces which give rise to the intertextual nature of academic texts. In the context of university students of English Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, course instructors have observed that the students can readily classify text types4 into narrative or descriptive passages; however, they have difficulty in explaining the reasons for their categorisation, particularly in identifying text-internal features of argumentative texts, such as the use of modal verbs, concessive constructions, and adversative lexical phrases in order to present various viewpoints. That is, students are intuitively aware of features of text types but this schematic knowledge is insufficient for them to produce good argumentative texts. These linguistic forms and text patterns (text internal features) should be understood as a means for negotiating a stance within a genre. But students rarely comprehend texts in terms of negotiating multiple text external discourses, perhaps because they do not fully understand texts as a form of social practice. It must also be admitted that student texts, mostly written for teacher evaluation, do not usually bring about any “consequent social action” (Bazerman 1994: 79). A useful concept for presenting such text external factors is genre. Swales (1990: 45–58) has defined genre as a class of communicative events with a shared set of purposes and goals, carried out within certain conventions for the presentation of contents, positioning and form. EFL undergraduate students, such as those whose texts are studied here, have not had enough experience with different varieties of academic texts, except for textbooks, to have formed prototypical concepts for these different texts, and in particular, for highly conventional texts such as a formal research paper. Since students’ contact with academic sub-genres has mostly centred 4. Text types have been defined following Werlich (1983), who proposes 5 types – description, exposition, narration, argumentation and instruction. Genre has been defined following Biber (1995) and Swales (1990). Text types are considered to have internal (linguistic) features which define the types in themselves, while genres are heavily influenced by cultural, external features. Different text types may occur within a single genre, as in a research paper, which may include a narrative account of past research, an expository account in the Methods section and argumentative text type in the Discussion section. In the 2001 book on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001: 95), text types are referred to, but these are in fact genres (comic books, textbooks, newspapers, etc.).

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JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce

on textbooks, it is very likely that they will confuse the types of text-internal features (such as the use of imperative verbs and vocatives like let’s) found in textbooks with the language they are to use in essays and academic papers. Therefore, sequenced, goal-directed reading tasks should be the starting point for genre acquisition (Swales 1990: 76). Linked to the concept of genre is that of discourse community, which is defined by Swales (1990: 24–27) as having “a common set of public goals” and, among the expert members of the community, shared discursive practices, which often develop into one or more genres. Our students need to become aware of the nature of the external and internal factors which influence the academic discourse communities they are entering, in our case, Linguistics and Literature. These differences exist both between these two communities and among various types of subgenre, such as textbooks, essays, critical analyses, and term papers (Bhatia 2004: 31). In addition to the necessity of beginning the AW course for university students with general notions of genre and discourse community, at a very early point, intertextuality should be introduced as a way of helping students realise that their texts will enter into some academic discourse community, as limited as that may be within their own institutions. There are various ways in which academic texts are intertextual. Their form is a reflection of prior texts (both in structural and rhetorical features). Their content also engages with prior texts, in that the arguments must be strengthened by the reading and digesting of others’ texts. Additionally, academic texts must combine both the author’s intention, that is, the stance expressed towards the content, with the evaluation of those texts read and cited as background material. Often students do not conceive of themselves as members of an academic discourse community and therefore do not see their texts as participating in what Briggs & Baumann (1992: 146) have described as the “ongoing process of producing and receiving discourse”. Without our students’ understanding of this dialogic process, they will not be able to make sense of the way in which structural and rhetorical features combine in order to construct an effective academic argument. There is a further complication for the Spanish context. Writing in academic contexts is often seen primarily as knowledge telling and may be governed by an assumption that students should display the knowledge they have acquired, usually that given by the teacher in class or the textbook. This attitude is reflected in examination questions which do not require the candidate to put forth stance moves or to have completed outside critical readings. For example, a typical literature question for a Spanish university entrance exam (Educared 2009) is the following: Características del Modernismo (“Characteristics of Modernism”). As it is not really a question, this type of essay prompt merely requires the candidates to list a set of characteristics, not to examine the various issues involved, or to contrast sources; in fact, the latter are not required at all. These types of prompts, requiring mainly descriptive answers, given over a number of years of schooling, mean that little attention is given to argumentation, as a lesser-valued skill at



The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 

secondary level.5 In contrast, in most schooling in English-speaking contexts, narrative and descriptive texts are the focus of instruction until approximately 9 or 10 years of age when factual writing of different types (description, report, explanation, persuasion, Martin 1990: 15) begins to take on importance (Perera 1989), not only for examinations but, when students are older, for longer texts as well, such as term papers. For the latter, argumentation becomes the main text type and descriptive text is used mostly for contextualization and exemplification, in support of the arguments presented. If Spanish contexts stress description (what something is like) over persuasive exposition/argumentative text types (reasons and arguments),6 Spanish university students entering English Studies may have to struggle in order to comprehend argumentation patterns and incorporate them into their writing. At tertiary level, it is difficult for instructors to convince students that they must strive to create their own voice, perhaps because the text internal and external features still remain implicit. The purpose of the can do statements elaborated for this course is to provide students with an explicit set of such features which can serve as the basis for academic literacy exercises, and ultimately, academic essays.

3. The academic writing course In order to encourage knowledge transformation, and not merely the knowledge telling found in descriptive texts, the instructors found it necessary to draw up a series of guidelines or can do descriptors to make explicit the required structural and rhetorical features to be learned. Since the competence levels of the students are mixed, the syllabus for the course centres on specific genre and intertextual practices, as displayed in Table 1, which must be learned by the students of the AW course, regardless of their competence level in English.7 5. This assumption is corroborated by the number of points given to the students taking the Spanish Literature and Language exams for university entrance. The argumentative essay counts for 1 point out of 10 points in total. 6. Although argumentation is one of the text types mentioned in preparatory university courses for Spanish students, it is not a text type that students frequently practise. 7. The classes are not streamed in the English Studies Department at our university; thus, as was the case in both AW courses considered in this study, students’ levels may range from A2 to C1, as tested during the first class with the Oxford Quick Placement (OQP) Test. It is not possible to simply exclude students whose level is not at B1, the level at which the first specific descriptors appear on the Writing Grid for Argument (Council of Europe 2009: 187). In order to measure students’ progress regarding the structural and rhetorical descriptors, the data from sample 1 (AW1) had to be matched with the final essay data (AW2) from the same students. For this purpose, we selected from each of the two courses (2007–2008 and 2008–2009), 20 initial essays (n = 40) and 20 final essays (n = 40). The competence level of the 40 students (OQP Test) was as follows: A2 level: 20%; B1 level: 20%; B2/C1 levels: 65%; and C2 level: 5%.



JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce

Table 1.╇ Can do statements for B2 level Features of structural and rhetorical competence

Qualifications

Structural features – Can reword the prompt of a writing assignment incorporating opposing points of view appropriate for argumentative genre – Can present all claims and supporting data in a logically organized way – Can use both prospection and encapsulation8 to create coherence – Can conclude by restating major ideas and placing the arguments in a wider context

– Proper contextualization – Few stranded claims or data – Few limitations regarding lexical phrases used – Suggestion of future events

Rhetorical features – Can consider other points of view, adopting a critical stance – Can incorporate intertextuality by reporting others’ views and statements, using lexical resources, such as adjectives, adverbs and verbs, which show writer alignment (stance) – Can use a reasonably extensive range of hedges and boosters as well as impersonalization strategies in presenting claims – Can successfully use a variety of discourse markers (DMs) to indicate flow of text

– Can distinguish among the arguments in sources – Can use a wide range of reporting verbs (suggest, claim, show, etc.) – Can make effective use of passive voice, modalized utterances, abstract rhetors (non-human agents) – Can effectively use lexical cohesive devices (synonyms, hyponyms, etc.) as well as DMs

These features were also used to measure the students’ written performance throughout and at the end of the course. These criteria enabled the instructors to avoid solely focusing on the elimination of student errors and instead, to concentrate, more reasonably, on feasible advancement in discourse competency. The can do statements were presented on the first day of the course and frequently referred to before focusing on specific writing exercises. Students reported having found these descriptors clear and useful and also having referred to them for home assignments. As can be observed in this table, the can do statements cover a range of genre characteristics. By the end of the course, the student is expected to display ownership 8. Following Sinclair (1993: 8), encapsulation is defined as phrases which reformulate what has been stated, usually in order to move on to another topic or conclusion, and prospection occurs when “the phrasing of a sentence leads the addressee to expect something specific in the next sentence” (Sinclair 1993: 12), namely because the speaker/writer has alluded to topics to be dealt with.



The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 

of the ideas presented as claims and sub-claims, as well as adopting an authorial stance suitable for a nuanced argumentation. Of the above features, the ones examined in this study are rhetorical rather than structural, particularly those related to intertextuality, such as the range of reporting verbs used and the internal (authorial) and external (non-authorial) voices used to present points of view.

4. The study As previously mentioned, the aim of the study was to discover how EFL students negotiate stance in academic papers, with the ultimate aim of examining our students’ progress in the acquisition of various devices for stance-taking, an important feature of the AW syllabus.

4.1

Texts included in the study

For purposes of measuring development in student writing, the SPICLE corpus (see Table 2), collected throughout the 1990s, provides a picture of Spanish EFL university writing without the benefit of a specific AW course. This corpus is a collection of texts (194,845 words) on general interest and literature topics, written by third- and fourthyear Spanish EFL university students, and included as the Spanish component of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), held at Louvain. The data from this corpus is compared with the two small sub-corpora (AW1 and AW2) of English Studies students enrolled in the Academic Writing class at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), during 2008 and 2009. These texts (27,462 words) are samples of argumentative essays written by second-year English Studies students on general interest topics (i.e., approximately the same as those used for the ICLE corpus, but excluding literature topics). Writing sample 1 (AW1), collected during the second-week of the course, was matched with the texts of the final sample (AW2), written by the same students. The students were required to do writing assignments throughout the course, but only course-initial and course-final samples of their writing were selected since the aim of the study was to analyse the students’ progress and evaluate the effectiveness of the AW course. These two AW sub-corpora show the gains made by UCM students after explicit teaching of the features of academic writing. The data from the two sub-corpora are also compared with each other in order to trace the development regarding the specific features listed in the can do statements. The study is further complemented by previous studies carried out on part of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), texts written by American university students, especially regarding the use of deictics referring to propositions in the text. The results from all of these studies will be used to inform the syllabus design for the AW course in the future.



JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce

Table 2.╇ Corpora included in the study Name of corpus

Number of words

SPICLE AW TEXTS AW1 AW2

194,845 â•⁄ 27,462 â•⁄ 10,596 â•⁄ 16,866

Since the corpora were of different sizes, all the figures for the data were normed per one hundred words to permit comparisons. The texts produced by the AW students represented a very limited number of words because, for the purpose of measuring progress, we could use only the texts written by the students who had completed both the first and final writing assignments, elaborated in class from notes. In Appendix I, there is an example of a final essay (AW2) from the writing course in 2009, and in Appendix II, in order to show developmental trends, there are two essays from the same student enrolled in the writing course in 2008: the initial essay (AW1) and the final essay (AW2).

4.2

Methods and procedures

In order to investigate stance-taking, we first searched for the reporting verbs used by the students in order to compare the latter with a list used by expert article writers in English (cf. Neff et al. 2001) and then also carried out a more qualitative study of the rhetors, or agents, established by the students as giving voice to evaluations or claims. Two main criteria governed the inclusion or not of data in the study: one concerning the rhetor (usually the subject) associated with the verb and the other concerning the ideas, statements or arguments introduced by the verb (usually the object). The first criterion was that the verb should be associated with an identifiable rhetor which could be considered to be one of the text’s voices (rhetors) and to participate in the textual discussions. Thus, the instances of conclude with the function of discourse organizer (e.g. “To conclude: the best solution is ...”) were not classified, since it was considered that they did not give sufficient emphasis to the rhetor, but rather served principally to organize the text. The second criterion was that the verb should introduce or be associated with propositional content which could be phrased as a statement or question (e.g. “Many agree that TV is too violent”). Thus uses such as “the discovery of AIDS has changed how people think” or “They should think about their morals” were not included. The data were included in the study if they fulfilled at least one of these criteria. An impersonal use such as “It is reasonable to conclude also that without the satellite this would not have occurred” was thus accepted because it fulfilled the second criterion though not the first, while “These works and studies have looked at this issue from many different angles” was also included on the grounds that it fulfilled the first criterion though not the second.



The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 

The initial quantitative approach was to focus on a range of reporting verbs, such as argue, note, suggest and show, which we had observed as frequently used in LOCNESS and expert academic texts (cf. Neff et al. 2001). We first searched for the root and irregular forms of the verbs (see Table 5 for the full list) using Wordsmith 5.0 (Scott 2007). Some instances of reporting verbs from the SPICLE corpus were not included when they occurred in display-type answers particularly in the literature essays, such as “In the two final stanzas, John Donne explains the meaning of that conceit” and “Joan says she will rather die than spend the rest of her days in prison”. These uses by SPICLE writers were considered instances of contextualization and not argumentation and therefore, were not taken into account in this study. The initial analysis of reporting verbs showed some basic patterns and tendencies with regard to the different discourse verbs used by the students. As well, it became apparent that certain verbs tended to be used with certain types of rhetors, e.g., “this shows that ...”. Therefore, in a second step, we carried out a more qualitative study in order to categorize the rhetors, that is, to classify the use of voice (abstract rhetor, nonspecific rhetors or personal pronouns, etc.) and impersonal and/or passive constructions (i.e., no agent). Academic texts frequently use rhetors of various kinds, such as those shown in Table 3: specific human agents (I, you, we); non-specific human agents (one); specific and/or named rhetors (two researchers from New York; Hyland); general, non-specific and unnamed rhetors (some people may think that ...); or, abstract rhetors (This study shows that ...). Also there is frequent use of impersonal constructions, such as it is Table 3.╇ Categorization of the different voices associated with reporting verbs Classifications

Examples

Abstract rhetors

An examination of the programming has concluded that ... it has been said that...; it is necessary to point out that... Some people may think...; Opponents claim...; Proponents of X argue that...; The average reader may not find... Methvin believes that...; Two researchers from New York found that... This shows that...

Impersonal and passive constructions General, non-specific and unnamed rhetors Specific and/or named rhetors Deictics as subject (referring to propositions in the text) “one” subject “you” subject “we” subject “I” subject

One may assume that... If you analyze many of these arguments... Before we discuss the case of ... Personally, I find that...; I have always believed that...



JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce

Table 4.╇ Different types of evaluative devices examined in study Evaluative lexical device

Examples

it + copular verb + adjectival phrase + that it + copular verb + adjectival phrase + to + verb of knowing/saying

it is obvious that...; it is indisputable that...; it seems more logical that... it is important to take into account that...; it is only natural to think that...; it seems contradictory to say that... immigration is obviously a problem...; but unfortunately, many governments do not....; I will briefly summarise...; scientists plausibly claim...

*ly adverbs used as disjunct/used to modify discourse verb

important to note that ... and passive constructions, such as it has been said that ..., in which the rhetorical act appears to have no human agency. Many of these latter constructions permit the writer to present her arguments as resting upon common knowledge and factual, objective data. All allow the writer to adopt a variation of stances with regard to the propositions put forward, which range from distancing from or subscribing to these propositions. There are, of course, many ways in which writer stance can be expressed and in successful academic argumentation stance-taking consists of a complex combination of a variety of linguistic features. Therefore, in a third step of the research, we decided to focus on four lexical resources for evaluation (all displayed with examples in Table 4) explicitly taught during the course, namely it + copular verb + evaluative adjectival phrase + that, it + copular verb + evaluative adjectival phrase + to + verb of mental or verbal processes, and two uses of adverbs ending in ly: those conveying a writer comment on the whole content of the proposition (disjunct), and those modifying a discourse oriented verb. As occurred with the reporting verbs, Wordsmith 5.0 was used for the word searches (using the strings it **** that, it **** to and *ly) and initial data sorting, while the subsequent elimination of irrelevant data was done manually. For the purpose of comparison, all the figures for the various data were normed per 100 words and chi-square was used to test for statistical significance.

5. Analysis and discussion Stance-taking in any piece of writing requires the use of different devices employed within a very nuanced textual process. During the AW course comprising 37 hours, it was not possible to teach all these diverse strategies. Thus, the instructors opted for a limited number of structural and rhetorical indicators, which appear as can do descriptors in Table 1. In this study we explore the use of various of these indicators, namely reporting verbs and rhetor types that occur with these, and four types of lexical devices for evaluation.



The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 

5.1

Reporting verbs

The principal findings for the reporting verbs in each corpus are presented in Table 5, with the raw figures in the left-hand columns followed by the figures normed by 100 words. First we discuss the unusual frequencies of some of the individual verbs and then some developmental trends. Table 5.╇ Occurrences of reporting verbs per corpus Verb

SPICLE Raw fig. Normed fig.

address* agree*/disagree* analyz*/s* argu* assum* believ* claim* conclud* discuss* establish* explain* find*/found focus* on hypothesis*/iz* indicat* look* at not* (note) point* out/to present* prov* (prove) provid* (+ evidential N.) refer* report* say*/said show* stat* (state) stud* (study) suggest* think*/thought Total

AW1

AW2

Raw fig.

Normed fig.

Raw fig. Normed fig

â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 32 â•⁄ 19 â•⁄ 12 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 51 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄â•⁄ 7 â•⁄ 14 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 30 â•⁄â•⁄ 3 â•⁄ 18 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 3 â•⁄â•⁄ 3 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 22 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 20 â•⁄â•⁄ 4

0 0.02 0.01 0.006 0.002 0.03 0.002 0.004 0.007 0 0.02 0.002 0.009 0 0.002 0.002 0.002 0.01 0.002 0.01 0.002

â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 2 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 2 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 8 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 2

0 0.02 0.04 0.04 0 0 0 0.02 0.04 0 0.06 0 0.04 0 0 0 0.04 0.08 0 0.04 0.02

â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 6 â•⁄â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 12 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 26 â•⁄â•⁄ 2 â•⁄â•⁄ 6 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 16 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 20 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 4 â•⁄â•⁄ 2

0 0.04 0.04 0.07 0 0 0.15 0.01 0.04 0 0.09 0 0.02 0 0.02 0 0.02 0.12 0 0.02 0.01

â•⁄ 25 â•⁄â•⁄ 1 246 â•⁄ 45 â•⁄â•⁄ 8 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 9 247 835

0.01 0.0005 0.1 0.02 0.004 0 0.005 0.1 0.4

â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 2 â•⁄ 8 10 12 â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 2 20 98

0 0.02 0.08 0.09 0.11 0 0.02 0.2 0.92

â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄ 18 â•⁄ 12 â•⁄ 24 â•⁄â•⁄ 0 â•⁄â•⁄ 8 â•⁄ 20 194

0 0 0.11 0.07 0.14 0 0.05 0.12 1.15



JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer and Caroline Bunce

5.1.1 Unusual frequencies As can be seen, four of the verbs used by expert writers (cf. Neff et al. 2001), address, establish, hypothesise-ze and study, were not used at all in any of the student corpora. There are also very few tokens of assume, find, look at and present. These results point to the EFL students’ lack of range in using reporting verbs, as corroborated by other studies (Charles 2006; Neff et al. 2001). It is worth noting that some of the reporting verbs used by experts are particularly academic in tone, such as hypothesize-se, and are probably not commonly used even by native undergraduate students. As a result of both novice writer and EFL writer limitations, both groups of EFL university writers show a certain tendency to rely on a limited set of discourse oriented verbs. 5.1.2 Developmental trends In comparing the SPICLE data with the AW data, three main trends become apparent: 1. the concentration of the SPICLE tokens on two verbs 2. the progressive increase in frequencies of use of some verbs: from SPICLE to AW1 to AW2 3. the progressive decrease in frequencies of use of some verbs: from SPICLE to AW1 to AW2 The data resulting from the corpus of students who had no specific training in AW, i.e., the SPICLE corpus, show that there is a much greater concentration of use on very few common discourse verbs. In fact, two verbs, think and say, account for approximately 59% of the total use of reporting verbs. The texts of students who received AW training show a broader range of reporting verbs. Verbs that carry more discourse value, e.g., suggest, state and claim, now appear more frequently, which allows these students to rely less heavily on think and say. In the AW1 texts, think and say accounted for approximately 29% and in AW2, 20% of the total reporting verbs. This result suggests that, although the AW writers still show a certain limited range of reporting verbs, similar to that of the SPICLE group, they rely far less on the two verbs previously mentioned and more readily use other discourse oriented verbs which are more academic in tone and convey a greater degree of authorial stance. Of the 21 remaining verbs (after discounting the 8 verbs occurring either negligibly or not at all in the corpora), 19 (agree/disagree, analyze, argue, claim, conclude, discuss, explain, focus on, indicate, note, point out/to, prove, provide, report, say, show, state, suggest, think) appear with greater frequency in one of the AW sub-corpora than in the SPICLE corpus, thus, in general terms corroborating the finding that the AW writers show less over-reliance on a limited range of verbs. It is encouraging for the instructors to note that 8 verbs (argue, claim, explain, indicate, point out, show, state, suggest) also show a longitudinal increase in frequency when the AW1 sub-corpus is compared with the AW2 sub-corpus. In the case of argue, explain, point out, show, state and suggest, the AW1 texts show a greater frequency than the SPICLE texts and the AW2 texts, in turn, an increase in frequency vis-à-vis the AW1 texts. Claim and indicate



The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 

are not used by the AW student writers in their first essays (AW1), but the students have incorporated them into their writing by the final week of the course (AW2) and use them with a greater frequency than the SPICLE writers. Finally, regarding the decrease in frequencies of use from SPICLE to the AW texts, there are two verbs, believe and refer, that show this tendency. The explanation for this decrease appears somewhat complex and can only be offered tentatively. In the SPICLE texts, 64% of the instances of refer correspond to interactive9 uses with the pronouns we and I (e.g. “We have previously refered to”, “here we are referring to the fact that”, “I am refering to Spain”). The AW writers’ avoidance of such expressions in an attempt to achieve a more impersonal academic voice explains, at least in part, the absence of this verb in their data. As far as believe is concerned, the SPICLE writers use this verb interactionally10 with I and we as rhetors in 43% of the cases, such as in “I believe that university studies must be reformed”. This means that their claims are often made almost exclusively in terms of personal experience rather than by relying on external authoritative sources. This overuse of believe may point to a transfer effect and a mismatch of registers since oral Spanish prefers believe (“yo creo”, I believe) to think for expressing personal opinions. In the light of these data our hypothesis was that, in contrast to the SPICLE writers, the AW students express their opinions by different means. One such device would be through evaluative adjectives and adverbs, which are used precisely to comment on the claims made by others, as in “Actually, what it clearly reveals is that the result of this process is ...”. This use of lexical resources to convey writer alignment would suggest that the AW students have been successful in incorporating the rhetorical devices set out in the can do statements. Table 6 presents the total number of occurrences of reporting verbs in the SPICLE data as compared with AW1 and AW2. There are statistically significant differences in frequency between the SPICLE texts (produced without the aid of specific writing instruction) and the two AW sub-corpora. Moreover, significance increases as the students progress through the coursework, from sample one (AW1) to the final essay (AW2). Table 6.╇ Total occurrences of reporting verbs: SPICLE, AW1 and AW2 Total reporting verbs Corpora SPICLE vs AW1 SPICLE vs AW2

SPICLE (raw figures)

AW texts (raw figures)

P

835 835

â•⁄ 98 194