Maggie Charles
Maggie Charles was a tutor in English for Academic Studies at Oxford University Language Centre for many years. Her research interests are in the analysis of academic discourse and the use of corpora in EAP pedagogy, especially data-driven learning.
Her paper with Gregory Hadley has just gained an honourable mention in the Ken Hyland Best Paper Award 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-english-for-academic-purposes/about/awards#ken-hyland-best-paper-award-2022-winner-announcement.
Her book length publications include Charles, M., & Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (Eds.). (2021). Corpora in ESP/EAP writing instruction: Preparation, Exploitation, Analysis. Routledge. Introducing English for Academic Purposes (Routledge, 2015, with Diane Pecorari), Corpora, Grammar and Discourse (2015, John Benjamins, edited with Nicholas Groom and Suganthi John) and Academic Writing: At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse (Continuum, 2009, edited with Diane Pecorari and Susan Hunston).
Maggie is a member of the scientific committee for TaLC (Teaching and Language Corpora) and was a consultant and contributor to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English (OUP, 2014). Her most recent publications are:
Charles, M., & Hadley, G. (2022). Autonomous corpus use by graduate students: A long-term trend study (2009–2017). Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 56, 101095. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101095
Charles, M. (2022). The gap between intentions and reality: Reasons for EAP writers’ non-use of corpora. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 100032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2022.100032
Charles, M. (2022). Corpora and autonomous language learning. In R. Jablonkai & E. Csomay (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 406–419). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002901-32
Charles, M. (2021). EAP research in BALEAP 1975–2019: Past issues and future directions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 101060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.101060
Her paper with Gregory Hadley has just gained an honourable mention in the Ken Hyland Best Paper Award 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-english-for-academic-purposes/about/awards#ken-hyland-best-paper-award-2022-winner-announcement.
Her book length publications include Charles, M., & Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (Eds.). (2021). Corpora in ESP/EAP writing instruction: Preparation, Exploitation, Analysis. Routledge. Introducing English for Academic Purposes (Routledge, 2015, with Diane Pecorari), Corpora, Grammar and Discourse (2015, John Benjamins, edited with Nicholas Groom and Suganthi John) and Academic Writing: At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse (Continuum, 2009, edited with Diane Pecorari and Susan Hunston).
Maggie is a member of the scientific committee for TaLC (Teaching and Language Corpora) and was a consultant and contributor to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English (OUP, 2014). Her most recent publications are:
Charles, M., & Hadley, G. (2022). Autonomous corpus use by graduate students: A long-term trend study (2009–2017). Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 56, 101095. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101095
Charles, M. (2022). The gap between intentions and reality: Reasons for EAP writers’ non-use of corpora. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 100032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2022.100032
Charles, M. (2022). Corpora and autonomous language learning. In R. Jablonkai & E. Csomay (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 406–419). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002901-32
Charles, M. (2021). EAP research in BALEAP 1975–2019: Past issues and future directions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 101060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.101060
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Maggie Charles
University of Oxford Language Centre
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Over the last two decades there have been many accounts of direct corpus use with language learners, particularly those studying academic writing in English (see Boulton 2010; Yoon 2011). To date, the majority of this work has evaluated the success of corpus consultation immediately on completion of an in-class corpus intervention. As Pérez-Paredes et al. (2013) note, fewer studies attempt to examine independent corpus use over the longer term. One notable exception is Yoon (2008), who tracks six students’ corpus use over a six month period; however, her study provides qualitative rather than quantitative data on continuing corpus use. Work by Charles (2013, in press) reports on independent corpus use by 40 students one year after their corpus course, finding that 70% of respondents were corpus users. However that study does not shed much light on the reasons behind use or non-use of the corpora.
To investigate this question further, the present paper reports on a new set of data from 72 students who responded to an on-line survey one year after using corpora on an EAP course. During this course, students built their own personal corpus from research articles in their field and used it to explore discourse functions in their discipline. The data reported here is part of the more wide-ranging survey and focuses particularly on factors that are likely to promote ongoing corpus use and those that may hinder or prevent take-up. The quantitative results are supplemented by qualitative data from interviews with two students, a corpus user and a non-user.
Respondents were first asked whether they had used their corpus at any time since the academic writing course had ended; 41 students (57%) had done so, while 31 (43%) had not. The two largest groups of users were those who were currently using their corpus (15, 37% of users) and those who had used their corpus in the past, but were not using it at the time of the survey because they were not doing any academic writing (16, 40%). Some users mentioned other factors which negatively affected their corpus use: preference for other resources, lack of time and lack of usefulness were each noted by 3 students (7%), while technical problems were important for just 1 user (2%). The findings for non-users presented a similar pattern: the biggest single reason for non-use was that respondents had not done any academic writing (11, 36% of non-users). Seven students (23%) preferred other resources and 6 (19%) did not find the corpus useful. Lack of time was cited by 4 (13%) and lack of experience by 2 (6%), while technical problems affected one student (3%).
The first conclusion that can be drawn from this data is that when students work independently, the need for writing resources such as corpora is likely to be sporadic. This has implications for the provision and content of corpus courses, as well as for their timing. Two specific factors that have a negative effect on continuing corpus use also stand out: lack of time and a preference for other resources, often perceived as quicker and more convenient to use. The importance of these factors is also underlined by student ratings of the potential disadvantages of their personal corpus: 41 students (58% of all respondents) considered lack of time and lack of convenience to be very important or important.
However the likelihood of take-up or rejection of personal corpus use also depends upon individual student concerns, as illustrated by the contrasting attitudes reported by two students. Ahmad characterised his personal corpus as ‘like having a lovely friend with you who can advise you any time you want.’ Piotr, however, concluded that personal corpus use ‘just took too much time, too much effort’. In accounting for this difference, it is noteworthy that Ahmad’s self-reported writing needs were mainly lexico-grammatical. Thus it was worth his while to build up his corpus to over a million words and he incorporated corpus use as a proofreading tool within his pre-existing writing practices. Piotr, however, was mainly concerned with the coherence of his text. Since such issues of overall textual organisation lend themselves much less easily to corpus investigation, he saw little or no benefit in investing time and effort in corpus construction and use.
This paper presents and discusses further the data on factors affecting independent personal corpus use and draws out the implications for fostering corpus consultation among students.
References
Boulton, A. 2010. “Learning outcomes from corpus consultation”. In M. Moreno Jaén, F. Serrano Valverde and M. Calzada Pérez (eds.), Exploring new paths in language pedagogy: lexis and corpus-based language teaching. London: Equinox, 129-144.
Charles, M. 2013. “Student corpus use: giving up or keeping on?” In A. Lenko-Szymanska (ed.) TaLC10: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on teaching and language corpora. Warsaw: Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. Available online at http://talc10.ils.uw.edu.pl/proceedings/.
Charles, M. 2014. “Getting the corpus habit: EAP students' long-term use of personal corpora”. English for Specific Purposes 35: 30-40.
Pérez-Paredes, P., Sánchez-Tornel, M. and Alcaraz Calero, J. (2013). “Learners’ search patterns during corpus-based focus-on-form activities”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17 (4): 482-515.
Yoon, C. 2011. “Concordancing in L2 writing class: an overview of research and issues”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10: 130-139.
Yoon, H. 2008. “More than a linguistic reference: the influence of corpus technology on L2 academic writing”. Language Learning and Technology 12 (2): 31-48.
Lee, D., and J. Swales. (2006) A Corpus-Based EAP Course for NNS Doctoral Students: Moving from Available Specialized Corpora to Self-Compiled Corpora. English for Specific Purposes 25 (1), pp. 56–75.
Teaching and Language Corpora Conference, Giessen, July 2016
Maggie Charles
Oxford University Language Centre
This paper reports on a course which aims to teach students how to use corpus tools for editing their texts. Although much has been written about the benefits of data-driven learning, particularly for academic writing (for a review, see Yoon, 2011), less attention has been paid to the potential of individual corpus tools for addressing specific editing concerns. The present course is targeted at doctoral students who have already completed part of their thesis in draft form. After an initial session introducing corpus work, students built two corpora: 1) research articles (RAs) in their own field; 2) their own writing. The freeware AntFileConverter (Anthony, 2014) was used for converting batches of pdf files to plain text format to build the RA corpus and AntConc (Anthony, 2015) for editing purposes. Class sessions provided demonstrations of how specific tools can be used for editing, followed by individual practice in which students used the tool to edit their own writing.
The course has run nine times and evaluation data are available for 66 students (41% natural sciences; 30% social sciences; 29% humanities). All participants gave a positive answer to the question ‘Is it helpful to use your corpus and AntConc for editing?’ (79% yes definitely; 21% yes probably). Students were asked to rate the individual tools for editing purposes as very useful, useful, fairly useful, of little use or not useful. Combining the very useful and useful categories shows that, unsurprisingly, the most highly rated tool was Concordance with 95% of responses. This was followed by Clusters (82%), Collocates and Keyword List (both 74%), N-grams (70%), Context Searching (67%), Concordance Plot (63%) and Word List (59%).
While the utility of concordancers and other tools that show collocations has been discussed in the literature (e.g. Flowerdew, 2015), I argue that tools such as Keyword List, Concordance Plot and N-Grams have affordances that are particularly relevant to students who are editing texts. For example, the N-Grams tool can be used to make a list of all the 3-grams in the student’s own writing and compare it with those in their RA corpus, thereby revealing differences in phraseology. Issues concerning the content of the text can be addressed using both Keyword List and Concordance Plot. A keyword list of one section or thesis chapter compared to the rest of the text identifies the words that occur more (or less) frequently than expected. This tool can therefore reveal the most salient words in a section or chapter and thus the extent to which the writer deals adequately with the topic under discussion. Concordance Plot provides a graphic representation of the distribution of a search term throughout the corpus files. When the term chosen is central to the student’s argument, this tool can show how the content develops over the course of the whole text. The present paper discusses further the course and the affordances of the corpus tools for editing, illustrating the findings with examples of student searches.
References
Anthony, Laurence. 2014. AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
Anthony, Laurence. 2015. AntFileConverter (Version 1.2.0) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
Flowerdew, Lynne. 2015. Using corpus-based research and online academic corpora to inform writing of the discussion section of a thesis. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 20. 58–68.
Yoon, Choongil. 2011. Concordancing in L2 writing class: An overview of research and issues. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10. 130–139.
reporting verbs followed by a that-clause complement. In each investigation, the quantitative data from concordance lines are supplemented by consideration of contextual information in
order to arrive at a qualitative interpretation of the findings. It is shown that writers make use of the grammatical features in order to construct the stance of an insider in the discipline, of one who is familiar with disciplinary norms and competent to engage in disciplinary practices.
The thesis also compares and contrasts both the extent to which politics and materials deploy the grammatical features and the functions they are used to perform in the two corpora. This comparison reveals how specific differences in the use of the grammatical features can be linked to differences in ideology and epistemology between the two disciplines. The study concludes by discussing and evaluating the use of corpus based methods in research on stance.