Multiple Perspectives on Multiple Perspectives on University History & Engineering University History & Engineering

AssignmentsAssignments

Sheena GardnerSheena GardnerUniversity of WarwickUniversity of Warwick

19th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference & 19th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference & WorkshopWorkshop

23-25 July 2007, 23-25 July 2007, Saarbrücken, GermanySaarbrücken, Germany

An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing in British Higher Education

Warwick - Reading - Oxford Brookes

RES-000-23-0800

Researchers

Hilary Nesi, Sheena Gardner, Jasper Holmes, Sian Alsop, Laura Powell, Richard Forsyth, Dawn Hindle

CELTE, Warwick

Paul Thompson, Alois HeuboeckSLALS, Reading

Paul Wickens, Signe Ebeling, Maria LeedhamICELS, Oxford Brookes

Project Aims

Develop a Corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE)

Characterise proficient student writing across disciplines and years

Four Research Strands

1. Corpus development

2. Discourse community perspectives

3. Multidimensional analysis of register

4. SFL analysis of genres

1. Corpus Development

a.Collect assignments

b.Tag files and prepare for submission to Oxford Text Archive

c. Develop Sketchengine interface for end users

d.Develop shared portal with parallel corpora (BASE, MICASE, MICUSP)

A Collection Issue: text vs texts

corpus as text: computational analysis of forms

Random SamplingStratified SamplingCluster Sampling

Opportunistic / Convenience SamplingPurposive / Judgemental Sampling

corpus as texts: ‘manual’ analysis of meanings

BAWE Corpus Grid (Stratified)

1 2 3 4

Arts & Humanities

Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Social Sciences

The 28 ‘disciplines’ targeted (Clusters then Convenience )

Arts & Humanities Applied Linguistics/ Applied English Language Studies, Classics, Comparative American Studies, English, History, Philosophy, (Archaeology)

Life Sciences Agriculture, Biochemistry, Food Science and Technology, Health and Social Care, Plant Biosciences, Psychology, (Medical Science)

Physical Sciences Architecture, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, (Mathematics)

Social Sciences Business, Economics, Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism Management, Law, Politics, Sociology, (Publishing), (Anthropology)

Corpus Texts targeted (Purposive)

from 24 ‘main’ disciplinesfrom each of 4 ‘years’

8 instances of 4 different assignments

= 3000+ assignments,And half that from five ‘minor’ disciplines = 3,500+

An estimated 10 million words

STRAND 2

2. Discourse Community

a. Departmental documentation

b. Tutor interviews

c. Student interviews

d. Assignment submission forms

Tutor on Engineering Projects:

In year four they have a team project with tasks similar to what they’ll get in employment. They work in teams with students from a range of engineering disciplines to tackle various complex engineering problems. They produce a document with costings targeted at a Venture Capital company.

On Engineering Reports:

There is a standard structure.. They have a layout of headings and a description of the sorts of things that would go under each of those headings, and they map whatever they’ve done onto that.

Although a third-year project may be similar in structure to a laboratory report written in the first year, the writer will have to assimilate, evaluate and integrate a wider range of information.

Engineering Students:

“Basically we make a summary first the reasons are if someone in industry wants to know what we’re doing, they haven’t got time to read through they just want to know what’s going on. Then the introduction .. Contents .. Then a theory which takes a huge chunk it’s explaining everything…”

“It doesn’t matter how good the project is, if it isn’t well written, it won’t get good marks”

Engineering assignments:

Laboratory reports Project reports Reflective journals Posters (e.g. for transport museum) Summaries of analysis + recommendations Site investigation reports (both factual and

interpretative) Funding proposals Business plans Essays

History Tutor:

Formative assignments are 2000-2500 word essays in response to a question, like an exam question. A rhetorical exercise to persuade the reader to accept the argument.

Summative essays are longer, 4000-5000 words. 8000 word essays require additional organisational skills.

History Student“I try to use different opinions. I say someone’s

opinion, then counter it with someone else’s. I weave my own perception in but I’d never say “this is what I think” directly. I use some arguing and counter but I always go back to my introduction stance.

… I put across my argument always and a. you have to consider the popular argument at the time. You don’t want to go against the flow completely as you don’t have the skill to do that. But b. I consider what the professor will think.”

History Assignments

Formative Essays (2000-2500 words)Summative Essays (4000-5000 words)Literature Review (2,500 words, recently

introduced in one core module)

Book Review (in one optional module)Summative Essay (8000 words; optional)

Strand 3

3. Multidimensional Register Analysis

Biber’s team tag the corpus for their lexicogrammatical features; do frequency counts, and factor analysis, identify dimensions of variance amongLevels, Disciplines, Groups, Text types.We interpret.

Biber’s dimensions, eg Narrative:

NARRATIVE |Romance fiction 7+ |[.......] | 0+Popular lore | |FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATIONS |Religion, Editorials -1+PUBLIC CONVERSATIONS, *classics* | |Press reviews, *history* | -2+TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS |Professional letters |Academic prose | -3+Hobbies, *anthropology* |BROADCASTS | | -4+ |*engineering*NON-NARRATIVE

Features of Narrative/Non-narrative dimension (Conrad and Biber 2001):

positive features past tense verbs third-person pronouns perfect aspect verbs public verbs synthetic negation present participial clauses

negative features (present tense verbs) (attributive adjectives)

BAWE dimensions (pilot data)

Factor 1: History is high; Engineering is low History: factual adverbs (definitely,

inevitably), likely adverbs (apparently, predictably), and existential verbs (seem, appear);

Engineering: predictive modals (will, would, shall), active verbs & total nouns.

Disciplines grouped with History

Warning: based on pilot data only

Factor 1

History, Psychology, Anthropology, Classics, English

Factor 5

History, Psychology, Anthropology, Law

Further Corpus Analysis

Descriptive statistics (TTR, word length, sentence length, text length)

Word frequencies (history, historians) Collocations (Ward 2007) Ngrams / lexical bundles (Eberle &

Leedham; Oakey) And more ….

Progression in History (WordsmithTools)

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3

Type/Token Ratio standardised

42.50 41.34 39.98

mean sentence length (in words)

22.32 24.04 27.63

Essay length (in words) cf Tutors’ counts

1500-3000

3000-5000

1500-5000, 12000

Progression in History (WS Freq)

Rank Raw Freq Freq/1000wds Texts %Texts

‘History’ Yr 1 74 75 1.3 15 75

‘History’ Yr 2 52 151 1.8 16 73

‘History’ Yr 3 24 304 4.1 14 87

‘Historians’ Y 1 172 34 (+5) = 39 0.6 (+0.0) = 0.6 9 (2) 45 (10)

‘Historians’ Y 2 204 45(+11)= 56 0.5 (+0.1) = 0.6 13 (7) 59 (32)

‘Historians’ Y 3 139 52(+33)= 85 0.7 (+0.4) = 1.1 8 (6) 50 (37)

(+ ‘Historian’)

Strand 4

4. Systemic Functional Genres

Three school history genres (Coffin) 1. Analytical exposition: (Background)^ Thesis^ Arguments^ Thesis Reinforcement

2. Analytical discussion:(Background)^ Issue^ Arguments^ Position

3. Challenge:(Background)^ Arguments^ Anti-Thesis

History Issue and Thesis

E.2 Issue (AD) This essay will look at continuity and departure through

these two periods thematically, and attempt to form a conclusion as to whether the 'Age of Braudel' conserved or contradicted original Annales historiography. (AD)

E.3 Thesis (AE) I will attempt to show why I agree with scholars such

as Craig Calhoun that it was primarily artisans that resisted the changes brought by industrialization and who seemed to have more of a sense of unity in comparison to the factory workers.  (AE)

(DC) Types and (SFL) Genres of History assignments

Yr Types Analytic Discussion

Analytic Exposition

Factorial Explanation

Challenge ?

1 22 essays

10 5 3 2 1

2 22 essays

10 8 1 3 -

3 15 essays

1 review

5 6 3 2

1

60 25 19 7 7 2

Progression in History Genres

No evidence of Coffin’s progression from Narrative to Analytical genres

No clear evidence of Coffin’s progression from narrative to argumentative language

Limited evidence of addition of ‘literature review’ stage to long essays

No clear evidence of increase in Challenges

Progression in History

In Field as identified by manual Assignment Initial Sentence Subject analysis AND by computational word frequency comparisons

In nature of sources: from books (1st yr), to edited books (2nd yr) to occasional journal articles (3rd yr)

Types and Proposed Genres in Engineering

Yr Types Lab Report

Design Proposal

Product Evaluation

Design Report

Exercise Diss. ?

1 Reports Exercise Case Study

8 2 1 -

1

- 2

2 Report 8 2 1 - 1 - 0

3 Report, Exercise Dissertation

1 1 5 2

2

3

-

17 5 7 2 4 3 2

Proposed genres (Engineering) Laboratory Report: to report on tests/experiments conducted;

(Summary)^Introduction^Theory^Apparatus^Methods^Observations and results^Analysis of Results^Discussion^Conclusion^Bibliography^(Figures & tables)^Appendices

Design Proposal: to put forward a proposal for a system or product: (Summary)^(Background)^Introduction^ Design Feature decisions ^(Costing/Suppliers)^ Conclusions^ (Bibliography)^(Appendices)

Product Evaluation: to evaluate a piece of equipment or procedure: Introduction ^Strengths ^Weaknesses ^(Practice/performance tests) ^Conclusions^(References)

Design Report: to design and test a system: Summary^Introduction^Theory^Analysis^Comparisons^Conclusions^References

Exercise: to practice a number of isolated generic stages or reflect on methodTask 1^Task 2^..Task n

Dissertation: to develop a design proposal for a system or product in the context of the literatureAbstract^Self-assesssment^Introduction^Literature Review^(Theory)^Methodology^Analysis and Results^(Discussion)^Conclusion^Costing^References^(Appendices)

Self assessment in Engineering

“the engineering data obtained ... was very limited .... The work is important as it showed .... The work should be continued to determine .... The work was a success in that ... The extent of the experimental work completed is not as great as originally expected ... The author found obtaining information on ... very difficult ... There was no scope in the available time to consider alternative .... Whilst efforts were made to minimise variations in ... these could not be eliminated completely during the project phase.” (Diss)

Summary (LR, DP, DR)

“A compact gearbox design is required to use in an electric drill to produce a 25:1 speed reduction from a motor developing 36W at 9000rpm. ... analysis ... costs ...comparisons ... Therefore it is believed that the gearbox is a cost effective design which makes economic use of available space” (DR)

Progression in Engineering

Building block Early genres aim to test, design, evaluate,

propose costings - separately Final dissertation puts these together, plus

‘literature review’ and ‘self-assessment’

Integrating Four Strands Corpus

Random sampling vs Purposive samplingin future: technology is promising …

Discourse CommunityNumber and nature of genres not predictable from department labels for assignment types

Computational AnalysisEven ‘simple’ descriptive statistics need other strands Findings may be unclear, or bring significant insights

Genre AnalysisPrompts need for further texts in the corpusNeeds to be checked with Discourse CommunityCan be reinforced by computational analysis

…Shunting ……Two-prongs ….. ……...Echo-chambers …. Strands Shunting [MAKH] – carriages being pushed along rail

tracks – 1961 ref to moving up and down rank scale; adapted by Miller 2006. But ‘tracks’ not at all clear from computational to manual analyses

Two-prongs [CMIM] – only two? Echo-chambers [T&H] – works from small text to large

corpus, but one-directional? some ‘sounds’ get lost? Strands? Here FOUR strands, not two: the corpus

development and discourse context are also variable and responsive to the computational and manual analyses; each strand is autonomous and separable, but they mutually reinforce for a rich description

www.warwick.ac.uk/go/bawe