What is the evidence for orality in first ‐ year composition ? Exploring the question or...

What is the evidence for orality in first‐year composition?

Exploring the question or ‘orality’ empirically with a controlled data set

WRAB III Paris, France 19 February 2014

Daniel KiesDepartment of English

College of DuPage

The Genesis of the Project

2 WRAB III Paris, France 19 February 2014

We noted several items related to the question of orality:

Growing concern for a “shift to orality” and consequently a degeneration, degradation, and overall diminishment of the English language

For example consider the next slide.

Comments in the popular media

Students use texting language in papers at university. Help!

I am not an English teacher, but I just started teaching at an American college and I have found that several students sometimes substitute a single number or letter for a word. One student used "4" instead of "for" throughout his entire paper. Another wrote "U" instead of "you." It was the kind of writing that you would expect to see in a text message. These students are still required to take English no matter what subjects they choose to major in, so it is hard for me to understand why they make mistakes like these. I have to assume that it is intentional laziness rather than a real error, but this makes it harder to correct.

Source: http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/137474-Students-use-texting-language-in-papers-at-university-Help




We noted a second trend in this line of thought:

The blame is usually attributed to the wide-spread adoption of communications technology by the millennial generation

For example, see the next slide

Comments in the popular media (2) Teenagers who frequently use 'techspeak' when

they text performed poorly on a grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former undergraduate student in communications at Penn State.

When tweens write in techspeak, they often use shortcuts, such as homophones, acronyms and omissions of non-essential letters such as 'wud' for 'would.’

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9432222/Texting-is-fostering-bad-grammar-and-spelling-researchers-claim.html


Teenagers who frequently use 'techspeak' when they text performed poorly on a grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former undergraduate student in communications at Penn State.

When tweens write in techspeak, they often use shortcuts, such as homophones, acronyms and omissions of non-essential letters such as 'wud' for 'would.’

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9432222/Texting-is-fostering-bad-grammar-and-spelling-researchers-claim.html




Finally, we observed:

Parallels between Birkerts’ and Ong’s explorations of linguistic change triggered by technological innovation seen in the shift from pre-literate (what Ong called “primary orality”) to literate cultures reflected in the “secondary orality” (Ong 1982) some researchers believe to exist in the contemporary technological, cultural, and linguistic environment

And similar remarks are found in the professional literature

Fears for the future of writing (1) Experts say that children write more these days

than they did 20 years ago, because of texting and social media. Most of that writing, however, is in text-speak, and that form of language becomes a bad habit. Students are now so used to writing in text-speak that they can’t easily remember (or apply) proper language rules.

Communication is becoming more global in scope and more electronic in form. By the time these children finish school and enter the workforce, this decline in the spoken (sic) word will become greater. Written communication, in a formal report, an email, or even a text, isn’t just happening on the colloquial level anymore, and children need to be educated on how to use technology in formal, professional contexts.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/9966117/Text-speak-language-evolution-or-just-laziness.html



Rebecca Gemkow, a Lyons Township High School English teacher, said she believes it is crucial for teenagers to recognize the difference between social and academic writing in order to be successful in the real world.

“I feel that all of the online opportunities and the time spent with such opportunities puts students at a deficit when it comes to producing sophisticated writing,” she said. “In result, there is a much greater responsibility put on teachers to help rectify the situation so that students will be prepared for the rest of high school, as well as post-high school writing.”

Source: http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/4600849-418/teachers-students-see-texting-lingo-popping-up-in-school-writing.html

Fears for the future of writing (2)


Background of our research corpus (1):

First-year composition (FYC) corpus, over 7 million words drawn from the academic writing of the general population of students in first-year writing classes at a community college in America’s Midwest.

The corpus spans the period 1989 - 2013, and thus allows for a comparison of student writing over the time period beginning with the adoption of the world wide web and search engines by the general population, and the present, when electronic texts are pervasive.



Background of our research corpus (2):

The FYC corpus is from the same composition courses taught by the same instructor over the period. This stability produces highly comparable data in terms of writing topics, and reduces variability that might have been due to different instructors’ pedagogical styles or abilities.

The writing prompts were intended to elicit essays in different academic genres such as summary, review of an article, argumentative/persuasive essay, descriptive/comparative response, analysis of persuasive writing, and definition. Major topics were the future of books, The Gutenberg Elegies, literacy, and in the second semester students typically wrote academic research essays on topics related to the Orwell’s 1984.




Background of our student writers:

All students have similar backgrounds cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic

Most students come from the western suburbs of Chicago that surround the college

All students have similar educational achievements


Research questions

What are the general features of first year composition students’ writing?

What are the principal markers of orality? Is there any evidence of a shift to orality in

first year students’ writing over time?


1. Review of previous research on differences between oral and written text.(e.g. Ong, Halliday & Matthiesson, 2004, O’Donnell, 1974, Chafe, Tannen)

2. Selection of comparable written texts (Orwell’s 1984 and Birkerts’ Gutenberg Elegies essays)

3. Conversion of word files to machine/software readable unicode text files

4. Parsing of 1984 texts using UAMCorpusTool (O’Donnell).5. Analysis of general linguistic features using UAM and

generation of descriptive stats. 6. General comparison with Biber’s (1988) Mean frequencies

for academic prose and face to face conversation. (Not all categories are easily comparable).

7. Finer analysis of wordlists using Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott)8. Concordancing of specific features using WSTools 6.

Future research: More fine-grained analyses. Factor analysis (Biber, 1988, 2006).

Methodology (1)

WRAB III Paris, France 19 February 2014

Methodology (2)Tools:

WordSmith Tools (Mike Scott) UAMCorpusTool (Mick O’Donnell) AntConc (Laurence Anthony)

Materials: The pronoun study corpus: 100,000 words on Birkerts’

Gutenberg Elegies. The verb study corpus: student research essays on George

Orwell’s 1984. Sub-corpus 1: 1998-99 (449,706 words) Sub-corpus 2: 2012-13 (363,157 words)


Methodology (3)Techniques:

Establishing sets of metrics from earlier research to provide a means to measure the orality of the students’ texts:

Biber et al. (2006) examined a range of university registers, both spoken and written (T2K-SWAL corpus).

Includes a wide range of spoken registers such as classroom instruction, office hours, and service encounters, and written academic registers such as textbooks and administrative texts, but no student writing.

The T2K-SWAL corpus provides a useful backdrop against which to compare student writing, but it does not examine the texts of novice writers. 15 WRAB III Paris, France 19 February 2014


Claims for writing (1)

Writing has been claimed to be: More structurally complex and elaborate More explicit More decontextualized/autonomous Less personally involved/ more detached or

abstract Higher concentration of new information More deliberately organized

(Biber 1988 p. 47).


The theoretical notion of register (field, mode and tenor) from systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) postulates a number of features that distinguish orality i.e. “very spoken” or conversational English from “very written” genres such as academic texts. Some markers of orality are: in terms of field, a tendency to focus on subjective experience; in tenor, reduction in social distance between interlocuters; and in mode, lower lexical density, higher grammatical intricacy, and the predominance of generalized “hypernomic” lexical items over more abstract or obscure meanings (e.g. went rather than walk or stagger).



Corpus-based research by Biber, Johannsen, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan (1999) showed significant differences between academic and spoken text. For example, 45% of the lexical verbs in spoken texts were represented by just 12 key words (words like say, make, think, and get). First and second person pronouns were much more common in spoken than academic texts.



More recent research

Spoken/written dichotomy is inadequate.

Biber et al. proposed seven dimensions that cut across academic discourse.

Many variations in spoken and written academic registers

Spoken registers are systematically different from written registers in vocabulary and lexico-grammatical choices.


Characteristics of spoken vs written text in academic contexts

Biber et al. described 7 dimensions of variation across registers, but in the university context:

“a fundamental oral/literate opposition” … holds between spoken and written modes “regardless of purpose, interactiveness, or other pre-planning considerations.”(Biber, 2006, p. 186).


Some key findings of Biber (2006):

Present tense is the most common tense in academic texts, both spoken and written. Humanities have the greatest proportion of past tense at 40%. However, these tend to be in connection with historical events rather than personal narratives.

95% of written and 90% of spoken academic registers use simple aspect.

Active voice is much more common than passive (80% in written academic registers and 90% in spoken.)

Characteristics of spoken vs written text in academic contexts (2)


Spoken vs written registers

Biber et al. (2002) found “strong polarization between spoken and written registers.”

Written (regardless of purpose) is informationally dense, (Dimension 1), non-narrative focus (Dimension 2), elaborated reference (Dimension 3), little overt persuasion (Dimension 4), and impersonal (Dimension 5).


University registers (Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd, and Helt, 2002)

Written (e.g. textbooks, syllabi, administrative info.)

Spoken (e.g. lectures, labs. study groups, office hrs)

Information-dense (D1) Involvement and interaction

Non-narrative focus (D2) Non-narrative focus (D2)

Elaborated reference (D3) Situated reference

Little overt persuasion (D4) More overt persuasion

Impersonal style (D5) Less impersonal in style


Oral and literate discourse compared on Dimension 1:

Positive features for orality:

“interactiveness and personal involvement (1st and 2nd person pronouns, WH questions), personal stance (e.g., mental verbs, that-clauses with likelihood verbs and factual verbs, factual adverbials, hedges), and structural reduction and formulaic language (e.g., contractions, that- omission, common vocabulary, lexical bundles)” (p. 186.)

These features contrast with literate discourse:

“informational density and complex noun phrase structures (frequent nouns and nominalizations, prepositional phrases, adjectives, and relative causes) as well as passive constructions” (p. 186.)


Markers of orality in lexical verb choice in a corpus of student academic writing.The third speaker examines changes in the use of lexical verbs over time. Although the verb (or verb phrase) is central to the meaning and structure of the clause (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) there has been little previous corpus-based research on the effect of verb choices on the academic writing style of native, or near-native speaker, students (But see Partridge, 2011 on L1 and L2 writers). In the current research, sub-sets of the FYC corpus from key time periods were analyzed using Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott, 2012) for markers of orality in the verb phrase. The findings were compared against the academic and spoken genre sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English COCA (100 million running words). The preliminary findings are that in this sample of college writing, after the 12 most common lexical verbs in the language, the next 20 most frequent verbs students used were from the spoken corpus rather than the academic corpus. The most frequent verb in the next 20 most frequent from the academic list is use. This is also consistent in the student data. Students rely on general purpose verbs like believe and understand that are also among the most frequent in conversation, rather than the most common verbs from the COCA academic list (e.g. provide, include, consider, determine). There is less lexical variety in verb choices, and more focus on general “troponymic” verbs (Fellbaum & Miller, 1990) than in the COCA academic corpus. Verb choices and frequencies in this sample of student writing overall share more in common with the spoken texts than the academic ones in COCA. However, there is no strong evidence of a shift towards greater orality in lexical verb choice over the period under investigation; if anything, the students of the 21st century appear to be making slightly more “academic” choices than their predecessors.

Oral and literate discourse compared on Dimension (2):


Results

Our data+ most closely approximates humanites. But first yr. comp is not so discipline specific.

Students still under influence of school genres.

Influence of classroom genres like the lecture and textbook.


Feature 1998-9 research papers

449,706 words

2012-13 research papers

363,157 words

% of total and Frequency/1,000 words

% of total and Frequency/1,000 words

Noun 32.72% (327) 32.60% (326)

Verb 16.23% (162) 16.53% (165)

Adjective 0.37% (4) 0.37% (4)

Pronoun 4.75% (47) 4.52% (45)

Adverb 3.99% (40) 4.06% (41)

Preposition

10.71% (107) 11.09% (111)

Conjunction

3.19% (32) 3.29% (33)

Comparison of linguistic features



Feature Biber 1998Academic

prose

Biber 1998Face-to-face conversation

FYC 1998-99 (2012-13)

Frequency/1,000 words

Noun 188 137.4 267 (265)

Adjective attrib.

76.9 40.8 3.7(4) (Comp. and super)

Preposition 139.5 85.0 107 (111)

Conjunction 3.0 0.3 32 (33)

Verb (past) 21.9 37.4 27.5 (25)

Verb (pres) 63.7 128.4 49.1 (49.7)

Pronoun (pers.)

5.8 39.3 (45)

Adverb 51.8 86.0 40 (41)


Grammatical verbs: be, have, do, modals. Lexical verbs:

Difficulty of separating lexical verbs from nouns that look the same. eg. command and command.

Find all verbs Past tense Present tense Passive Passive without agent Present participle Past participle Most common verbs in both speech and writing

Most common verbs in COCA spoken corpus Most common verbs in COCA ac corpus (look for humanities subset). Latin-based verbs. Phrasal verbs substituting for Latin-based or single word verbs.


Results: Interjections corpus.byu.edu (Academic prose [journal

articles]) SECTION

2005-2009

# TOKENS 6031

SIZE 102,046,528

PER MILLION 59.10

Results: InterjectionsOrwell research papers 1998-99

Length: - Number of segments:109 - Words in segments:128

Text Complexity: - Av. Word Length:4.04 - Av. Segment Length:1.17

Lexical Density: - Lexemes per segment:0.72 - Lexemes % of text:61.72%

Results: InterjectionsOrwell research papers 2012-13

Length: - Number of segments:60 - Words in segments:56

Text Complexity: - Av. Word Length:3.93 - Av. Segment Length:0.93

Lexical Density: - Lexemes per segment:0.67 - Lexemes % of text:71.43%

ResultsOrwell research papers 1998-99 and 2012-13 versus

Academic prose (corpus.byu.edu)

Contractions: - -

Voice: - -

Nominalization: - -

Prepositional phrases: - -

Conclusions (1) Uses of texting and emoji

ur = ‘your’ YMMV = ‘Your mileage may vary’ eat ur own dogfood = ‘Use your own device or

software’ or ‘Follow your own advice’

;-) = ‘wink’ = ‘Just kidding’ or ‘Just flirting’

No examples from student data (except for one paper in which a student compares texting to Newspeak)

Conclusions (2) Uses of texting and emoji = the return of the Rebus

principle

Conclusions (3) The return of the Rebus principle = a commonly used

communication system, which we use everyday whenever we use a technology mediated communication (smart phones and browsers)

ReferencesBiber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY:

Cambridge University Pres.Biber, D., Johannsen, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999).

Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.

Biber, D. (2006) University Language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins.

Fellbaum, C., & Miller, G. A. (1990). Folk psychology or semantic entailment? Comment on Rips and Conrad (1989). Psychological Review, 0033295X, 97(4), 565-570.

Freeman Y.S. & Freeman, D. (2009) Academic Language for English language learners and struggling readers. How to help students succeed across content areas. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3 ed.). London: Arnold.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge.

Partridge, M. (2011). A comparison of lexical specificity in the communication verbs of L1 English and TE student writing. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(2), 135-147.

Scott, M. (2012). Wordsmith Tools version 6. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.


Contact InformationDaniel Kies

Department of EnglishCollege of DuPage

425 Fawell Boulevard

Glen Ellyn, Illinois 60137, USA

[email protected]


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