Writing Natural English
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short prsentation on writing
Transcript of Writing Natural English
Features of natural writing –The 4 Cs Coherence
The text makes sense to the reader Cohesion (flow)
The text’s elements are connected Collocation
The words are combined appropriately Colligation
The word or a group of words are in the appropriate position in the sequence
Natural writing
“Writing with confidence calls for a wide repertoire of words and phrases that enable the writer to express concepts and perform common functions in natural and stylistically appropriate ways.”
Rundell & Granger
Learners’ writing needs
Learners need to write discursively in a wide range of contexts Academic assignments Argumentative essays Dissertations Professional reports
Barriers to success:
Accuracy Fluency Register awareness Different L1 conventions (contrastive
rhetoric – Robert Kaplan, 1966 and Ulla Connor ,1996)
How can research help?
Corpus analysis can look closely at the language of both native speakers and learners, and discover where learners’ problems typically arise.
“Good corpus data enables us to pinpoint those learner errors which are especially widespread and recurrent.”
Rundell & Granger
Macmillan / Louvain project Resources
Native speakers’ academic writing corpus (15,000,000 words from BNC + smaller corpus of academic texts)
International Corpus of Learner English (3,000,000 words from learners’ argumentative essays from 16 mother-tongue backgrounds including Chinese and Japanese)
Key findings
2 key problem areas
Accuracy Lexical Grammatical
Fluency
Rundell & Granger
Accuracy
Lexical choice“University learns you how to think and judge with your own mind.”
Register“During the last few decades there has been lots of discussion about…”
Countability“You need to balance the evidences from both sides.”
Rundell & Granger
Accuracy
Articles “Although the slavery was abolished in the 19th century…”
Quantifiers“… every year there is an increasing number of violence around us.”
Rundell & Granger
Accuracy
Syntactic patterning / complementation
“some researchers suggest to reformulate the hypothesis..”
“…it can also have a bad influence to people.”
Rundell & Granger
Fluency
Learners tend to have a limited range of linguistic resources
They sometimes misuse them
They often use them repeatedly
Rundell & Granger
Fluency
“Often it’s not a matter of finding ‘errors’; the usage will often make perfect sense and conform to grammatical rules. But when we find, for example, that learners writing academic texts use the discourse-marker besides about 15 times more frequently than native speakers writing in the same mode, there is at least an issue to be discussed.”
Rundell & Granger
Fluency
The adverb besides
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Academic writing Learner writing
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per
mil
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Examples from Malaysian students’ writing “Besides that, homework that is
related to reading is a good idea…” “Besides that, tourism also give
benefit to our economy because…” “Besides that the government
could promote local culture…” “Besides parents and teachers,
friends can also motivate teenagers to read more.”
Expressing opinions
“Corpus data indicates that as far as I am concerned and from my point of view are both popular with learner writers but these expressions are barely used at all by native speakers (for whom in my opinion and in my view are far more common devices).
Rundell & Granger
Expressing personal opinions
Collocation
Verbs frequently used in the structure it is worth + V-ing:asking, considering, emphasizing, examining, investigating, looking at, mentioning, noting, pointing out, quoting, recalling, remembering, repeating, stressing
Get it right
Don’t use the expressions according to me or according to my opinion when you give your opinion. According to me, the prison system is not outdated.In my opinion, the prison system is not outdated. According to my opinion, women and men are equal.In my view, women and men are equal.For more information on according to, see the writing section on “Quoting and Reporting”.
Expressing opinions
Learners’ incomplete understanding
“The Ministry of Education claimed that the children should get more free time.”
Claim implies a statement is untrue or possibly wrong
A neutral verb e.g. state or argue would be better
Rundell & Granger
Collocation
“Unsurprisingly, learners lack intuitions as to which words go with which and this accounts for many errors… using texts to highlight particular collocations, and teaching new words in association with their most frequent collocations are two ways of approaching the problem. Nowadays learners’ dictionaries also include useful collocational information…”
Thornbury
Help in dictionaries:collocates of ‘progress’
Collocation
“Parents also need to show a good example to their children.”
example noun 2 [singular] a person or way of behaving that is
considered as a model for other people to copy set an example You should be setting an example for your little brother.
“Their children will follow them when they see that their parents are reading.”
Follow verb ***8 [intransitive/transitive] to do the same thing that someone else has
done: What one child does, others will often follow. follow someone into something (=decide to do the same job as
someone else) She decided not to follow her mother into banking. follow someone’s example/ lead Canada may follow the EU’s
example by banning these products. • Other students followed her lead and boycotted lectures.
Colligation
“The place in a sequence that a word or word sequence prefers (or avoids)”
Hoey
An expression carries the correct meaning but is misplaced / put in a ‘non-preferred’ position in a sentence.
Colligation – ‘therefore’
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Academic writing Learner writing
Fre
q. p
er m
illio
n w
ord
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therefore at the beginning of the sentence
“Therefore we can provide facilities without changing the originality of the place.” Malaysian student
Word choice – ‘originality’
originality noun [uncountable] 1 the quality of being new, interesting, and
different from anything that anyone has created before
musical compositions of great originality 2 the ability to think of, do, or create
something new, interesting, and different
His writing shows real originality
Word choice – ‘uniqueness’unique adjective 1 very special, unusual, or good You will be given
the unique opportunity to study with one of Europe’s top chefs
2 not the same as anything or anyone else Each person’s DNA is unique ▪ They have a totally unique approach to staff training
3 only existing or happening in one place or situation unique to The problem is not unique to British students
uniqueness noun [uncountable]
Lexical poverty
“Many learners are operating with a very limited repertoire, so their frequently resorting to a small stock of common general words and phrases is hardly surprising.”
E.g. learners overuse important but infrequently use synonyms such as key, critical and crucial
Rundell & Granger
Enriching word choice
“Tourism is important to our county and it must be further developed by the government…”
“Tourism is crucial to our country’s economy …”
Enriching word choice - adverbs
“Tourism is important in our country and it must be developed in order to…”
Collocations Adverbs frequently used with important 1
crucially, extremely, most, particularly, terribly, vitally
“Tourism is vitally important…”
Practical help for learners
Accuracy“Get it right” boxes appear at over 100 dictionary entries and cover the most widespread and recurrent learner errors. They include: Explanation of the source of the problem Authentic example of the error Recommended alternatives Exercises on the CD-ROM
‘Get it right’ boxes:
Practical help for learners
Fluency
Study pages ‘Improve your Writing Skills’ focus on key functions e.g. Exemplification Expressing opinions Expressing possibility and certainty Drawing conclusions
Improve your Writing Skills
Provide rich description and examples words and phrases typically used in EAP contexts including: meanings, nuances register, frequency phraseology and collocation colligational features common pitfalls, illustrated by corpus data
Include frequency graphs showing discrepancies between native speaker/student usage
“In summary, by developing rural areas, promoting local culture…”
References
Rundell, M. & S. Granger (2007) “From corpora to confidence”, English Teaching professional issue 50
Thornbury, S. (2006) “An A – Z of ELT” ,Macmillan Hoey, M. (2005) “Lexical priming”, Routledge
Thanks to Angeline Ranjethamoney Vijayarajoo, Universiti Teknologi MARA, MELAKA
www.macmillandictionaries.com
