This paper reports on a linguistic analysis of request emails written in English by young Busines... more This paper reports on a linguistic analysis of request emails written in English by young Business English (BE) graduates working in trading companies in China. The emails were extracted from a corpus of 307 messages (34,837 words) between these graduates and their clients around the world, mostly in countries where English is only used as a Lingua Franca. The BE graduates often dealt with multiple clients simultaneously, under considerable time constraints, and made use of templates and prefabricated phrases to speed up the writing process. The findings have interesting implications for English language teaching and the teaching of Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF). The writers of the emails collected for this study clearly had a restricted command of English, and for this reason English language teachers might be unwilling to use authentic texts of this kind as models for their students’ writing. However, BELF usage may help to achieve business writers’ purposes more effe...
Transcribed recordings of 160 lectures and 39 seminars held in university departments. Four broad... more Transcribed recordings of 160 lectures and 39 seminars held in university departments. Four broad disciplinary groups, 1,644,942 tokens in total.
Scholars from Mainland China are increasingly publishing in the medium of English in order to gai... more Scholars from Mainland China are increasingly publishing in the medium of English in order to gain visibility and credibility worldwide. However, while Chinese scholars in the hard sciences now feature extensively in international databases such as the Science Citation Index, the visibility of Chinese scholars in the Social Sciences Citation Index is strikingly low. Due to the holistic, interpretative, reiterative nature of knowledge in the soft sciences, writers have to work harder to establish personal credibility through their claimmaking negotiations, sharing sympathetic understanding and promoting tolerance in their readers (Becher, 1994; Becher & Trowler, 2001; Hyland, 2000). The Chinese language has developed in a strict political environment within the particular cultures of Confucianism and collectivism where high importance is given to context and greater energy is devoted to saving 'face'. It is probably for this reason that the tradition of argument in China is considered to be more implicit, more modest, more positive, less engaging and less evaluative than in the Anglo-American argumentative traditions (
This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language c... more This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language corpora. It takes as a case study the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC) which contains a selection of the letters held in the BT Archives, housed in Holborn Telephone Exchange. One of the essential differences between a corpus and an archive is that a corpus is intended to be representative of a language variety. Material makes its way into historical archives in a variety of ways, and while they may preserve a breadth of material, archives are not generally collected to be representative, nor are they primarily designed to facilitate linguistic investigation. Work on the BTCC began as part of a Jisc-funded project to digitise the BT Archives and create a ‘research resource for the higher education sector’ (Hay, 2014:12). The BT Digital Archives became available to the public in July 2013. Our experiences using this resource inform the second half of the paper, in particular re...
This paper describes an experiment to compare the speed and success with which subjects from diff... more This paper describes an experiment to compare the speed and success with which subjects from different language and cultural backgrounds read and make productive use of learners' dictionary entries. Two groups of subjects, one from Malaysia and the other from Portugal, produced sentences using given target words, with optional access to dictionary information. Computers monitored their behaviour during the task, and the sentences they produced were subsequently rated for appropriacy. Although the Portuguese group knew fewer English words, they were found to access dictionary information less frequently, to read dictionary entries more quickly, and to produce more appropriate sentences after dictionary consultation. First language influence was not always found to have a positive effect on interpretation of the dictionary entry.
This paper reports findings from a preliminary study of upper-level and high-scoring undergraduat... more This paper reports findings from a preliminary study of upper-level and high-scoring undergraduate literature essays from the Academic Writing at Auckland (AWA) corpus, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The study aimed to identify differences in students’ academic writing style in these contexts. Just under 100 argumentative essays were analyzed (25 each from Britain and New Zealand and 47 from Michigan), using the Multidimensional Tagger (Nini, 2014), the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker et al., 2015), measures of readability and manual analyses including counts of references. The essays from MICUSP were found to be the most interactive and conversational, and the essays from AWA were found to be the most formal and ‘academic’. The essays from BAWE fell somewhere in the middle on most measures. This paper reports on these differences and suggests their implications for students studying i...
This paper reports on a linguistic analysis of request emails written in English by young Busines... more This paper reports on a linguistic analysis of request emails written in English by young Business English (BE) graduates working in trading companies in China. The emails were extracted from a corpus of 307 messages (34,837 words) between these graduates and their clients around the world, mostly in countries where English is only used as a Lingua Franca. The BE graduates often dealt with multiple clients simultaneously, under considerable time constraints, and made use of templates and prefabricated phrases to speed up the writing process. The findings have interesting implications for English language teaching and the teaching of Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF). The writers of the emails collected for this study clearly had a restricted command of English, and for this reason English language teachers might be unwilling to use authentic texts of this kind as models for their students’ writing. However, BELF usage may help to achieve business writers’ purposes more effe...
Transcribed recordings of 160 lectures and 39 seminars held in university departments. Four broad... more Transcribed recordings of 160 lectures and 39 seminars held in university departments. Four broad disciplinary groups, 1,644,942 tokens in total.
Scholars from Mainland China are increasingly publishing in the medium of English in order to gai... more Scholars from Mainland China are increasingly publishing in the medium of English in order to gain visibility and credibility worldwide. However, while Chinese scholars in the hard sciences now feature extensively in international databases such as the Science Citation Index, the visibility of Chinese scholars in the Social Sciences Citation Index is strikingly low. Due to the holistic, interpretative, reiterative nature of knowledge in the soft sciences, writers have to work harder to establish personal credibility through their claimmaking negotiations, sharing sympathetic understanding and promoting tolerance in their readers (Becher, 1994; Becher & Trowler, 2001; Hyland, 2000). The Chinese language has developed in a strict political environment within the particular cultures of Confucianism and collectivism where high importance is given to context and greater energy is devoted to saving 'face'. It is probably for this reason that the tradition of argument in China is considered to be more implicit, more modest, more positive, less engaging and less evaluative than in the Anglo-American argumentative traditions (
This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language c... more This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language corpora. It takes as a case study the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC) which contains a selection of the letters held in the BT Archives, housed in Holborn Telephone Exchange. One of the essential differences between a corpus and an archive is that a corpus is intended to be representative of a language variety. Material makes its way into historical archives in a variety of ways, and while they may preserve a breadth of material, archives are not generally collected to be representative, nor are they primarily designed to facilitate linguistic investigation. Work on the BTCC began as part of a Jisc-funded project to digitise the BT Archives and create a ‘research resource for the higher education sector’ (Hay, 2014:12). The BT Digital Archives became available to the public in July 2013. Our experiences using this resource inform the second half of the paper, in particular re...
This paper describes an experiment to compare the speed and success with which subjects from diff... more This paper describes an experiment to compare the speed and success with which subjects from different language and cultural backgrounds read and make productive use of learners' dictionary entries. Two groups of subjects, one from Malaysia and the other from Portugal, produced sentences using given target words, with optional access to dictionary information. Computers monitored their behaviour during the task, and the sentences they produced were subsequently rated for appropriacy. Although the Portuguese group knew fewer English words, they were found to access dictionary information less frequently, to read dictionary entries more quickly, and to produce more appropriate sentences after dictionary consultation. First language influence was not always found to have a positive effect on interpretation of the dictionary entry.
This paper reports findings from a preliminary study of upper-level and high-scoring undergraduat... more This paper reports findings from a preliminary study of upper-level and high-scoring undergraduate literature essays from the Academic Writing at Auckland (AWA) corpus, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The study aimed to identify differences in students’ academic writing style in these contexts. Just under 100 argumentative essays were analyzed (25 each from Britain and New Zealand and 47 from Michigan), using the Multidimensional Tagger (Nini, 2014), the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker et al., 2015), measures of readability and manual analyses including counts of references. The essays from MICUSP were found to be the most interactive and conversational, and the essays from AWA were found to be the most formal and ‘academic’. The essays from BAWE fell somewhere in the middle on most measures. This paper reports on these differences and suggests their implications for students studying i...
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