Positioning lexical bundles in university lectures

1. Positioning lexical bundles in university lectures Eniko Csomay ecsomay@mail.sdsu.edu Viviana Cortes viviana@iastate.edu

2. Goals of this study • To investigate which previously identified frequently occurring lexical bundles appear in the initial discourse units of university lectures in the T2KSWAL corpus. • To identify relationships between the bundles’ discourse function with the position they are in and discourse structure

3. Research questions • Which lexical bundles occur in the first three units? • What are the most frequent functions they perform in this position?

4. Outline Background lexical pattern studies in university lectures unit of analysis in university lectures Methodology definitions procedures Findings existing bundles missing bundles bundles and discourse structure Conclusion

5. Lexical patterns and university lectures • lexical phrases & micro- and macro structures (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992) • discourse markers & topic shifts (Hansen 1994) • lexical repetition & coherence (Tyler 1995) • specific word functions, frequent collocations of particular words, idioms (e.g., Mauranen 2003, Swales and Burke 2003, Simpson and Mendis 2003) • frequent word combinations & their functions (Biber, Conrad and Cortes 2004)

6. ‘Units’ of analysis and discourse structure in university lectures • “openings” and “closings”(Sinclair and Coulthard 1975) • “phases”(Young 1994) • “Vocabulary-Based Discourse Units”(Biber, Csomay, Jones and Keck 2004, 2007)

7. Lexical bundles Most frequently recurring lexical sequences in a register; not structural units or fixed expressions (Biber et al. 1999). Methodology: Computer program captures and counts every four-word segment in corpus; cut-off point varies.

8. to do is Four-word sequence # 1: ok what I want

9. do is Ok Four-word sequence # 1: ok what I want Four-word sequence # 2: what I want to

10. is Ok what Four-word sequence # 1: ok what I want Four-word sequence # 2: what I want to Four-word sequence # 3: I want to do

11. Ok what I Four-word sequence # 1: ok what I want Four-word sequence # 2: what I want to Four-word sequence # 3: I want to do Four-word sequence # 4: want to do is

12. For example every day conversation what do you mean, I don’t know why academic prose as a result of, in the case of, on the other hand university lectures if you look at, nothing to do with, I want you to

13. Further classification Structural verbs and clause components “you want me to”; noun phrase and prepositional phrase components “in the case of” etc. Functional expressing different types of stance, e.g., “I don’t think so”, “if you want to”, “it is important to” organizing discourse, e.g., “on the other hand”, “let’s have a look” expressing reference e.g., “the rest of the”, “in the case of”, “at the same time”.

14. Bundles occurring more than 40 times per million words in university classroom sessions are positioned.

15. Vocabulary-Based Discourse Units Automatically identified lexically coherent discourse units (Biber, et al. 2004, 2007) using modified TextTiler (Hearst 1994). Methodology: computer program compares orthographic words in adjacent window of running text and calculates a similarity value at each word. Unit boundaries are determined relying partly on next lowest similarity value.

16. Identifying units on analysis

17. Units of analysis based on lexical patterns

18. Further classification of units in spoken classroom discourse Linguistic Co-occurring linguistic features in units cluster into four major groups. Functional Interpretation of those groups result in four unit- types: Contextual interactive, Informational monologue, Personalized framing, and Unmarked (Csomay 2007).

19. Discourse structure Unit-types are re-entered into discourse flow. Language used in the first three units in lectures is associated with “Contextual interactive” discourse (Csomay 2005); Instructional functions associated: class management, instructional management; technical management; demonstration.

20. Classifying units based on linguistic characteristics Contextual interactive

21. Procedures for this study Design computer programs to • track bundles previously identified in university class sessions and • to compute running count for each bundle in their position Compare frequencies of bundle types across units.

22. Findings Of the 84 most frequently occurring bundles in class sessions identified by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004): 65 bundles (77.4% of the total) at least once in the first three units 19 bundles (22.6% of the total) did not occur in the first three units

23. Bundles in all three initial units

24. Bundles in one unit only at least once Only in Unit 1 Discourse organizer “I mean you know” • You know it was really hard for me. I went to [xxx] and I was really trying to find, a book in the book… not the bookstore but the library but this is the only one I came up with. I mean you know, from, um, this had in the book review tonight and some of the other books that the other students had, you know I mean, I want it… (Topic elaboration and clarification)

25. Only in Unit 2 Referential expression “and one of the” Attitudinal/Modality stance expression “you need to know” • … but you certainly need to be aware of what are your pitfalls… one of the things that stay between you and getting a paper written and one of the things between between you and getting a paper in press… you want to think about that… (Identification/focus)

26. Only in Unit 3 Referential expressions “and this is the”, “in a lot of”, “greater than or equal”, “than or equal to” • …it will matter and the main reason is if you're not a member of the elite you get ignored. And this is the danger of society. Now do we think, and I've heard this argument over and over again particularly in places like Arizona. (Identification/focus)

27. Missing bundles Stance markers • Expressions of personal epistemic stance “I don’t know if”, “I don’t know what”, “I don’t know how” • Attitudinal/modality stance indicating • personal desire “I don’t want to” • personal obligation or directive “you don’t have to”, “you don’t want to” • personal intention/prediction “I’m not going to”, “we’re going to do”, “what we’re going to” • impersonal intention/prediction “it’s going to be”

28. References • Identification/focus “that’s one of the”, “and things like that” • Specification of attribute, quantity “there’s a lot of” Discourse organizers • Topic introduction/focus “want to talk about”

29. Bundles and discourse structure To clarify or anticipate future events in the course or in future classes, or what the current course is going to deal with. • uh as far as the kinds of questions that could be asked uh they are going to be since they are short answer questions, they are going to be the kind of answers that will only take about at best ideally would take only about a paragraph (Attitudinal stance - Impersonal intention/prediction)

30. To stress desire or to tentatively provide directions or special information to students. • Uh, you know actually the best way to show me the results would be to show me the chart with the date column with the start date and finish date column. Uh, if you wantto put it in the form of the node diagram and put the put the right data in the right boxes, that's fine. (Attitudinal/Modality stance - Personal desire)

31. To create a mental frame for the students for the given topic. • … but you certainly need to be aware of what are your pitfalls… one of the things that stay between you and getting a paper written and one of thethings between between you and getting a paper in press… you want to think about that… (Referential - Identification/focus)

32. To guide students toward the organization of the class that is about to start (from the teacher’s point of view), providing a frame to the content about to follow. • But I, I was instructed that I must have you, and I assume you are familiar with this exercise…Uh, today, uh I assume today's the fourth. OK what I want to do is pick up with what uh, pick up where I hope you left off with it last week and maybe even take a, a bit of time to revisit that, and, uh, that exercise that you did (Discourse organizers - Topic introduction/focus) see Table 1 for summary

33. Conclusion Positioning lexical bundles in the first few units in a university lecture provides further empirical linguistic evidence about those units. This kind of lexical information and their discourse functions support previous empirical studies describing the linguistic characteristics of the initial units and their function in class sessions. Further research investigates the position and distribution of bundles in the subsequent units.

34. Eniko Csomay ecsomay@mail.sdsu.edu Viviana Cortes viviana@iastate.edu