Helping international students to master transition markers

1. Helping international students to master transition markers Milada (Millie) Walkova BALEAP 2019, Leeds

2. Overview • Definition • Student problems • Critique of teaching materials • Teaching suggestions • Conclusion

3. What are Transition Markers? transition markers  (Hyland 2005) linking words  (Harrison et al. 2012)

4. Transition Markers are Metadiscourse • Hyland (2005): metadiscourse is language used to help the reader/hearer understand the text and engage with it

5. Transition Markers (TMs) • interactive metadiscourse resources which “[help] the reader interpret links between ideas” (Hyland 2005: 50)  • discourse markers (Maschler & Schiffrin 2015) • express semantic relations (Hyland 2005): • addition, e.g. moreover,   • comparison and contrast, e.g. likewise, in contrast • consequence, e.g. thus

6. Student Problems Over to you:  • What problems do your students typically have with TMs? kmicican. 2017. https://pixabay.com/vectors/session-science-pictogram-fatigue-1989711/

7. Student Problems

8. Overuse in student writing Corpus: TECCL Sample: 09536 • student writer example • Chinese L1 • 8 TMs in total • 4.67 TMwords per 100 words Nowadays, numerous college students choose to get a part-time job to rich college life. There is no doubt that taking part-time job would bring plenty of benefits. Above all, part-time job can make our life more enjoyable and meaningful; that is to say, it can add more color to the same day in and day out of the life. What's more, part-time job can make we college students get in touch with the society earlier. We would know what the real world is. And some college students live an extravagant life with a pocket money given by their parents, which keeps them from the hardship of earning money in the real world. More importantly, part-time job can help students gain some useful experience to approach the society and establish some connections in advance. Besides, because not every family is wealthy, getting a part-time job can lighten their burden.   As every coin has two sides, there are still some disadvantages in taking a part-time job. On the one hand, it occupies some of the students' spare time and the time in studying would decrease, maybe it would keep our attention from focusing on learning. Therefore, our study would be affected in a certain extent.   In a word, there are always two sides about all the things, what we need to do is to keep the balance of both sides. Undoubtedly, for college students, part-time job can not only improve the social connection, but also get plenty of precious experience. Therefore I think college students should take part-time jobs. 

9. Overuse in student writing Hyland (2016) – extract • expert writer model • English L1 • 9 TMs in total • 1.68 TMwords per 100 words • compared to 4.67 TMs/100 word in the student example Academic publication is now an enormous industry that dominates the professional lives of academics across the globe, with perhaps six million scholars in 17,000 universities producing over 1.5 million peer reviewed articles each year (Björk, Roos, & Lauri, 2009). The reach and significance of this industry has never been greater because it is through publication that knowledge is constructed, academics are evaluated, universities are funded, and careers are built, and each year its influence becomes ever more intrusive and demanding. Publication is where individual reputations and institutional funding coincide; the result of managerialism and an accountability culture that seeks to measure ‘‘productivity’’ in terms of papers, and citations to those papers. In this context ‘‘knowledge’’ is regarded as a thing that can be parcelled up and measured, and those that produce it are seen as deserving of rewards. The more knowledge produced, the greater the reward.  Scholars around the world have therefore found their promotion and career opportunities increasingly tied to an ability to gain acceptance for their work in high profile journals indexed in the Web of Knowledge SCI databases and usually published in English. This counting of output, for example, helps explain the four-fold increase in submissions to the 4200 journals using the ScholarOne manuscript processing system between 2005 and 2010 and why this increase is led by academics from countries that have not traditionally been strong in research. So while submissions from traditional publishing powerhouses such as the United States and Japan increased by 177% and 127%, respectively, during these 5 years, those from China and India increased by 484% and 443%, and Iran and Malaysia saw more than 800% increases in submissions (Thomson Reuters, 2012). Overall, the U.S. share of world submissions dropped by 3.3% over this period while China‘s increased by 5.5%, moving it from 14th to 5th in world output in just 10 years (Royal Society, 2011). More recent figures from SCImago (2014) show China just behind the United States in submissions.  Submissions, however, are not accepted articles and the dominance of English in academic publishing has raised questions of communicative inequality and the possible ‘‘linguistic injustice’’ against an author’s mother tongue (Clavero, 2010). Native English speakers are thought to have an advantage as they acquire the language naturalistically while second language users must invest more time, effort, and money into formally learning it and may experience greater difficulties when writing in English. Attitude surveys reveal that English as an Additional Language (EAL) authors often believe that editors and referees are prejudiced against them for any non-standard language uses while Flowerdew (2008) even claims that EAL writers are ‘‘stigmatized’’ by journal editors and reviewers—the ‘‘normals.’’ (p. 79). In this paper, I critically examine the evidence for linguistic injustice – or editorial prejudice – through a survey of the literature and a small study of EAL contributions to leading journals. To support my argument I draw on interviews conducted with 25 EAL scholars of various first language backgrounds, disciplines, and publishing experience together with a handful of Native English speaking scholars.1 I argue that framing publication problems as a crude Native vs non-Native polarization functions to demoralize EAL writers and ignores the very real writing problems experienced by many L1 English scholars.

10. Overuse in student writing Is the modern nation-state real or imagined? To answer this conundrum, there have been countless debates on the nature of the State among social scientists. We can categorize these arguments into two competing schools of thought: Marxian notion of the instrumental state and Weberian theory of the state-centered approach. Which theory correctly captures on the nature of the State? If instrumental, how can we understand people's nationalistic sentiment firmly grounded in a territorial and social space of the nation-state? If real, how can we explain impersonal, reified citizenry and its abstractedness? Rethinking Marx and Weber, I will argue that there is no contradiction between them, although each had a different emphasis. Thus I treat them not as mutually exclusive but as two sides of the same coin. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels assert that The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. This famous definition on the State has been generally represented as the instrumental State in canonical Marxism, anchored in so-called economic determinism. Instead of using the conventional term instrument, my suggestion is to use a new term the nominal State in order for us not to fall into the trap of economic reductionism. By describing characteristics of the modern, nominal State, we then discover its hollowness and thus its reified nature. Sayer (1991) illuminates this nominal aspect of the State so my argument below relies largely on his explanation. Marx's original work emphasize the nominal aspect of the State in that it is an illusory representation of capitalist society and what Sayer called an ideological project (Sayer, 1991: 83). The modern liberal State consists of its subject, the citizen, and therefore it is a truism to say that if it is a mere collective misrepresentation then a characteristic of citizen is also essentially misrepresentation. Sayer argues that Marx focuses on the abstraction of the individual as the basis for civic citizenship and observes that this citizenship has never extended to all individuals who live within civil societies (1991: 84). Thus, according to Marx, a citizen is an abstract individual who can be equated with the bourgeoisie: the commodity exchanger in civil society. Here double processes of abstracting, reifying civil society and the State, conjoin. That is the reason why Marx criticizes the Hegelian argument- the Family superceded equals Civil Society, Civil Society superceded equals the State, the State superceded equals World History  and departs from the Berlin Young Hegelian circle (1964:185). For Marx, the State is not a supercedence of civil society but another abstraction from civil society abstracted from the family. Likewise modern world history, the history of inter-state relations, is not a cumulative process of dialectical transcendence from the Family but a consequence of triple abstractions from it. Corpus: MICUSP Sample: SOC.G3.03.1 (essay) • student writer model • Korean L1 • 8 TMs in total • 2.58 TMwords per 100 words • expert model 1.68 • student example 4.67

11. Semantic misuse in student writing [arguing that electricity is better than petrol for the environment] For one thing, electricity is regarded as one of the "green fuels. " As we all know, when burning petrol, it will release some poisonous gases. Besides, carbon dioxide gas is the largest greenhouse gas.  Corpus: TECCL Sample: 09475 • student writer example • Chinese L1 • “trying to impose surface logicality” (Crewe 1990: 320)

12. Stylistic misuse in student writing … These are excellent suggestions; I would really like to see them in action right away. But if pupils will work more in school, so will teachers. And their burden is already heavy as it is. To make this suggestion work, schools must employ more teachers so there will be a tutor for every pupil who needs one. One of the reasons why pupils do not learn as much as needed is the fact that there is not enough teachers. And schools do not employ more teachers because they cannot afford it. So the question is how this could be done economically. …  Corpus: USE Sample: 0185.b7 • student writer example • Swedish L1 • initial but, and, and so – informal(Chang & Swales 1999) and on the rise (Hyland & Jiang 2017)

13. Stylistic misuse in student writing Some people think that knowledge should be emphasized in education. Because they treat it as the source of study.  From the picture,we can see choose the biggest holiday at home people proportion ,is thirty eight percent.Whiletwenty seven percent of people choose to travel abroad. Corpus: TECCL  Samples: 00676 and 00773 • student writer examples • initial because and which without a main clause • syntax (Gardner & Han 2018) or style?

14. Teaching TMs Over to you:  • How do you teach transition markers? mohamed hassan. 2017. https://pixabay.com/vectors/professor-silhouette-teacher-3044680/

15. Problems with Teaching Materials Learning English is not easy, but in some ways learning German is more difficult, because German has different articles for masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. Moreover, you have to change the endings of adjectives, which is harder for speakers of English than for, say, speakers of French, which also uses adjectival endings. People say that knowing English helps you to start to learn German, but when you have passed the basic stages, it is less help, and knowledge of English is no help at all at advanced level. Frequency: texts not authentic • Lynch & Anderson (2013) • 5TMs in total, 1 sentence-initial • 5.68 TMwords per 100 words • student example 4.67 • student model 2.58 • expert model 1.68 • Input flooding (Wong 2005)

16. Problems with Teaching Materials Frequency: sentence-level practice • Oxford Grammar for EAP (Paterson 2013: 65)

17. Problems with Teaching Materials Semantics: little juxtaposition of semantic relations in some materials • Oxford Grammar for EAP (Paterson, 2013) - TMs for addition, contrast, and consequence 

18. Problems with Teaching Materials Style: 'forbidden' sentence-initial TMs not discussed • Academic Writing (Bailey 2015: 181)

19. Teaching Suggestions • Authenticity: authentic rather than pedagogic texts • Discourse:practice at the level of discourse rather than sentence • Semantic relationships: identifying semantic relationships in text as an important step in analysing and producing texts • Style:raising awareness as to appropriateness of sentence-initial position of selected TMs

20. Teaching Activity 1 • Remove TMs from an authentic model text and replace them with gaps.  • Studens read the text and mark out for each gap which two ideas the missing TM joins. • Students decide what the semantic relationship between the two ideas. • Students choose an appropriate TM.

21. Teaching Activity 2 • Highlight TMs in a student text.  • Students decide whether the TMs have been used semantically and stylisticallyappropriately. • Students suggest better alternatives.

22. Teaching Activity 3 • Students listen to an authenticspoken discourse(e.g. a TED Talk) and read the transcript to find instances of selected sentence-initial TMs. • Students read an authenticwritten discourse(e.g. a journal article) and find instances of selected sentence-initial TMs. • Students draw conclusions on stylistic appropriateness of using the selected TMs in sentence-initial positions.

23. Conclusion