Philip Durrant – författare

Corpus Linguistics for Writing Development provides a practical introduction to using corpora in the study of first and second language learners’ written language over time and across different levels of proficiency. Focusing on development in the use of vocabulary, formulaic language, and grammar, this book• discusses how corpus research can contribute to our understanding of writing development and to pedagogical practice;• reviews a range of corpus techniques for studying writing development from the perspectives of vocabulary, grammar, and formulaic language and interrogates the methodological bases of those techniques; and• guides readers to perform practical analyses of learner writing using the R open-source programming language.Aimed at the novice researcher, this book will be key reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of education, language, and linguistics. It will be of particular interest to those interested in first or second language writing, language assessment, and learner corpus research.

Corpus Linguistics for Writing Development provides a practical introduction to using corpora in the study of first and second language learners’ written language over time and across different levels of proficiency. Focusing on development in the use of vocabulary, formulaic language, and grammar, this book• discusses how corpus research can contribute to our understanding of writing development and to pedagogical practice;• reviews a range of corpus techniques for studying writing development from the perspectives of vocabulary, grammar, and formulaic language and interrogates the methodological bases of those techniques; and• guides readers to perform practical analyses of learner writing using the R open-source programming language.Aimed at the novice researcher, this book will be key reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of education, language, and linguistics. It will be of particular interest to those interested in first or second language writing, language assessment, and learner corpus research.

This Element explores relationships between collocations, writing quality, and learner and contextual variables in a first-year composition (FYC) programme. Comprising three studies, the Element is anchored in understanding phraseological complexity and its sub-constructs of sophistication and diversity. First, the authors look at sophistication through association measures. They tap into how these measures may tell us different types of information about collocation via a cluster analysis. Selected measures from this clustering are used in a cumulative links model to establish relationships between these measures, measures of diversity and measures of task, the language background of the writer and individual writer variation, and writing quality scores. A third qualitative study of the statistically significant predictors helps understand how writers use collocations and why they might be favoured or downgraded by raters. This Element concludes by considering the implications of this modelling for assessment.

Quantitative corpus research on written language development has expanded rapidly in recent years, assisted by the ever-increasing power and accessibility of software capable of reliably analysing huge collections of learner writing. For this work to reach its full potential, it is important that researchers have a strong understanding of its methodological foundations and of the existing empirical evidence base on which it can build. This book provides the most comprehensive discussion to date of research in this area. Covering both first and second language learning contexts, it sets out a coherent theoretical framework and systematically reviews studies published over the last seventy years in order to establish what such research has taught us about written language development, what it hasn't taught us, and what we should do next. Timely and original, this is an essential reference work for academic researchers and students of first and second language writing.