Language description and course and materials design

1. Language description and course and materials design Dr Sue Wharton

2. What do we mean by language description? It’s about what actually happens – and, where possible, about why it happens.

3. Stubbs (2007) on empirical language description: Language is both an abstract system, and also the use which a community of speakers make of the system. Descriptive, empirical linguistics is based on the second aspect – on the data which we can see. It has ‘disproved’ some descriptive claims based on introspection. In particular, computer-based analysis of corpora: • Is inherently quantitative • Shows what is usual and what is less usual • Shows patterns of lexical behaviour ( KWIC technology) • Explanatory inferences can be drawn from observed patterns “By organising huge masses of data, technology can make visible patterns which lie outside unaided human perception and which no amount of introspection or manual analysis could discover”. (2007: 131).

4. However, not all language description is entirely quantitative. Genre analysis, for example, has an important qualitative and interpretive dimension.

5. On the contribution of corpus studies: “Studies of large corpora provide two main contributions to linguistics. First, they provide many new and surprising facts about language use. This is an important test for an approach to language study: it can help us to learn new things. Second, by looking at language from a new point of view, corpus studies can help to solve paradoxes which have plagued linguistics for at least a hundred years. … Corpus data and methods provide new ways of studying the relations between language system and language use. If a pattern becomes very frequent in use across very large quantities of text, then it becomes entrenched as part of the system. Frequency in text becomes probability in the system.”. (Stubbs 2007: 126).

6. On the contribution of genre analysis: Genres, then, provide a frame (Swales 2004) which enables people to take part in, and interpret, particular communicative events. Making this genre knowledge explicit can provide learners with the knowledge and skills they need to communicate successfully in particular situations. It can also provide learners with access to socially powerful forms of language. (Paltridge 2006: 103)

7. Some cautionary points about the scope of linguistic description: Widdowson 2003 Widdowson’s arguments: Descriptions, however good, should not automatically set pedagogic goals Giving a primacy to description sets linguists in power over teachers. Some descriptions are more relevant to learners than others. Descriptions are often based on native speaker norms, and learners may not necessarily intend to imitate these. “All linguistic descriptions are necessarily limited…. [although] corpus descriptions carry a reality that others do not, it also needs to be recognised… that the reality they represent is only partial.” (Widdowson 2003: 86)

8. Language description: researchers, teachers and learners Where do language description theories come from? What is the position of language teachers vis a vis language description researchers? Can language teachers generate particular language descriptions? Do they do so? Can learners be asked to generate particular language descriptions? If so how, and using what data?

9. Online corpora: access to language description for teachers and learners? Access to online corpora is now very easy, but how to use it may not be so obvious. Key reference: Anderson, W. & Corbett, J. (2009). Exploring English with Online Corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan

10. A small scale corpus based description project: • Sue’s research into the writing of undergraduate Statistics students: Wharton, S. 2012: Epistemological and interpersonal stance in a data description task: findings from a discipline-specific learner corpus. English for Specific Purposes, 31: 261-270.

11. Collected some assignments from a first year Stats course, and made them into a corpus: • Transcription into .txt documents • Choosing tags • Recording contextual information Resulted in a corpus of 40 texts, 43027 words in total. Shortest text: 523 words. Longest text: 1977 words.

12. Choosing a task to focus on Study an OECD table on total health expenditure per capita and life expectancy at birth for member nations. Plot a graph of life expectancy vs. total health expenditure Discuss what the graph shows Use the graph to estimate a life expectancy for Chile.

13. An analytical focus: Stance • A writer’s opinion or attitude towards a proposition that their sentence expresses • Allows writer positioning vis a vis not only the information expressed but also the construed readership • Consensus in EAP that it is challenging for NNES

14. Results: Found some patterns in the stance options which students were using. Pedagogically useful via an awareness raising approach: students can be shown or encouraged to find these patterns and to compare their own writing to them. Not every pedagogic corpus needs to be based on NS use!

15. A small scale genre based language description Myskow, G. & Gordon, K. 2010. A focus on purpose: using a genre approach in an EFL writing class. ELT Journal 64, 3, 283-292. Working with Japanese secondary students, so chose to work with the genre of letter of university application

16. Collecting samples: no access to authentic applications at first, so collected samples from websites etc Over time, have replaced these with letters written by previous students Partly influenced by previous research, have developed an idea of the macro structure of the genre: Introduction → Dreams/goals → Experiences → Academic accomplishments → Reasons for applying → Contributions → Conclusions

17. Language description and your CMD project • How specifically can you describe your learners’ target language situations? • In the light of the above, what sources of language description are going to be most important? • Is it appropriate to develop your own description? • If not, what are the best sources of description available to you?