It’s really an honour to be here to give
the St Claire Lecture and I promise that I
will talk about corpus linguistics, though
we will visit some bridges and a number of
plates of spaghetti as we go along. Some of
them real ones, some of them metaphorical
ones.
But to get started I actually want to take
you to the Tuscan Word Centre in October of
2001 and for those of who don’t know at
that point, John Sinclair and his wife, Eleanor
Tonini-Bonnelli were running corpus workshops
and seminars in Alcoa in Tuscany, thus the
Tuscan Word Centre. And I figured I will never
be invited to the Tuscan Word Centre. I had
done my PhD with Doug Bieber and I worked
on the London Grammar and I did a lot of analysis
that was quantitative and used, corpora that
were tagged for part of speech and John was
emphasising working with an annotated corpora
and he was not very impressed with quantitative
studies. Plus I was American and most of the
funding for the Tuscan Word Centre activities
seemed to be EU related and I just thought
‘ah, well, it would have been nice, but
no way I’m going to see that place’. And
then out of the blue I got an invitation from
John saying that he was running a week-long
series of workshops for relatively young,
new scholars in corpus linguistics in Europe
and would I come and do a half day workshop
on any topic I wanted and just interact with
everybody for the week. And I thought ‘mm,
he doesn’t have to ask me twice’.
As you can see if you can make out the faces,
I’ve identified me and John, but there are
several other people in that picture who are
actually in the room right now. It was a great
group of people and even if you can’t make
out faces, if I list all the names they are
names that you would recognise. It was an
outstanding week, but what I really want to
tell you a story about has to do with a plate
of spaghetti. So I was the first to arrive
for the week because of the way the flights
worked out and they knew I was coming a few
earlier and had just told me ‘oh, grab a
taxi from Pisa when you get in’. So I got
in around lunchtime, for some reason I didn’t
get anything to eat, just got in the taxi
and went out to the villa and I remember being
very tired and very hungry. And I got out
and it was a gorgeous day and here’s this
wonderful villa and I thought ‘oh, this
is almost magical’ and then I smelled this
wonderful aroma that had to be a wonderful
pasta dish and I thought ‘ha, this is perfect,
lunch is even waiting’. And Eleanor came
out and brought me into the house and then
she called to John and said ‘oh, Susan Conrad
is here and lunch is ready’. And it was
kind of a dim hallway and I could tell this
figure of a man comes walking out and I’m
thinking ‘oh wow, I’m going to meet John
Sinclair and should I be ready to defend quantitative
corpus linguistics or what’s going to happen?’
He comes out and he looks at me and I kind
of remember him squinting and he says ‘are
you here to eat my lunch?’ [laughter] And
I was completely speechless and I thought
‘oh my God and I am coming here to eat his
lunch because I am so hungry, that’s what
I want to do’. Luckily Eleanor came and
graciously got me out of that and there was
plenty of spaghetti to go around completely.
But that was my first memory of John in person.
My first memory of this legendary figure who
I knew had done so much to help people see
how we could expand the boundaries of what
we do with linguistic study and really come
to understand language from all different
perspectives and in different ways. And on
that note what I want to go into is how can
we continue to expand the boundaries and the
impacts of corpus linguistics? And I especially
want to talk about incorporating our linguistic
knowledge with knowledge of experts in disciplines,
especially disciplines who don’t think of
themselves as being language related fields.
And also about integrating corpus techniques
with other research techniques and then finally
extending from description, because most of
us are raised as descriptive linguists and
moving from that to advice and instruction
as ways to continue expanding the boundaries.
Why should we do this? Because instructors,
students, professionals in other fields need
us. They don’t know that, most of them,
but they need us. So what I want to do is
give you a couple of examples of corpus analyses,
though a lot of my talk has to do with thinking
about things at the project kind of level
and definitely it’s a plea for applications
of corpus linguistics, all from my personal
experience and working on my personal experience.
And if you caveats are disclaimers here my
example is definitely not the only example,
there are other people sitting here right
now who have great examples of very applied
projects in different fields. I’m using
mine because I know it. I’m also talking
specifically about something in the US educational
context. Now I really don’t want to be held
responsible to have explain the United States,
especially right now, but this is a particular
context and I know in Europe, I learned at
the CLARIN workshop on Monday
there’s a lot more collaboration with other
disciplines already, it sounds like. It’s
fairly rare for linguists in the Unites States.
I am also saying just a little bit about a
lot of different things and kind of skating
over a lot of details. We would be here all
evening if I was filling all the details,
but I’m happy to, during the question session,
or later on or via e-mail, even answer questions
about specific areas that you’re interested
in. And finally I want to say I believe that
descriptive work is valuable. I’m talking,
I’m encouraging application but we need
descriptive work too, so I’m not trying
to argue we should get away from all descriptive
work in corpus linguistics, but I am hoping
that in the future more corpus linguists think
about real applications and kind of hoping
the changes in world based on corpus analyses.
So my example comes from Civil Engineering
and so we meet our first cable staid bridge.
Civil Engineers are the people who work on
infrastructure mostly, so if you’re thinking
of bridges and roads, buildings, tunnels,
those kinds of things. And working in with
Civil Engineers now I notice things like bridges
all the time, so this actually is a picture
from our vacation in France and that’s my
husband’s bike helmet in the corner because
I was on the back of our tandem. But I thought
‘oh there’s a bridge, a cable staid bridge,
I have to get a picture of that’. So virtually
everyone has experience interacting with Civil
Engineering projects because we use them all
the time. What most people don’t know is
very much about how the profession works.
There is a large amount of what I call high
stakes frame. The only product that most firms
produce is write, Civil Engineers don’t
actually build anything, all they do is write
instructions of various sorts for other people
to build things. If it’s ineffective writing
they have unhappy clients, they have all kinds
of delays, projects that already cost hundreds
and millions of dollars and are costing even
more and in the worst cases they end up with
injuries and even death of people. In virtually
every survey of graduates of Civil Engineering
programmes and employers almost always the
first, maybe the first, maybe the second thing
that comes up is there needs to be better
preparation for writing in practice, over
and over that comes up. Meanwhile University
courses there’s usually lots of writing,
but very little writing instruction and here
I’m talking about undergraduate University
courses in the US. I don’t know about other
places. So often writing is something that
has something to do with kind of arbitrary
style rules that came down from some English
Department or God or somebody, they don’t
really know where. It has nothing to do with
Engineering. Engineering is the calculations,
is what a lot of students and sometimes faculties
think. And there’s this kind of vague concern
about writing, but when I started looking
at the field I saw no one is studying it really,
even technical writers pull out examples of
things but there are almost no systematic
studies of what actually gets written by Civil
Engineers and what gets written by students.
So I thought ‘ha, I see a problem and corpus
linguistics can help’. So you might notice
this is not the sort of collaborative project
where somebody in another discipline had a
research question and kind of came to me thinking
I might be able to help. This was me seeing
a problem in a field and coming in like ‘hi,
I’m a corpus linguist and I’m here to
help you’. They had no idea even what a
linguist was, let alone a corpus linguist
in most cases. I think now most of the time,
most of the faculty I work with are happy
that I appeared, though I imagine occasionally
they think ‘what circle of hell is this
and what did we do to deserve it?’ But how
collaborative projects get started might be
something we want to talk about during the
discussion time.
For those of you who have heard me talk in
the past year in Manheim or at the Corpus
Conference in Iowa or in Portland at a couple
of conferences, the project is going to sound
familiar to you, if you remember. And there
are a couple of examples that I’ve taken
that are the same, but I don’t think anything
will be a repeat or I don’t think for anyone
everything will be a repeat, so just to reassure
you if you’re thinking ‘mm, doesn’t
this sound familiar’ there are some new
things coming up. The other thing I want to
say with the example is another plate of spaghetti
appears. This time on our dinner table. Because
my husband is a Civil Engineer and I actually
got started with this project because over
dinner when I’d say ‘well honey, how was
your day?’ I started to hear so many complaints
about new hires in their firm and how they
couldn’t write. There were so many complaints
that I finally said ‘oh bring me some to
look at’ and I was thinking ‘it can’t
be that bad’. And I looked at it and I thought
‘whoa, it is that bad, no wonder my poor
husband is complaining all the time’. So
then I started asking him more and more about
what he does in practice as a Civil Engineer
and getting more documents and that got the
entire process going and eventually it has
turned into what I call the Civil Engineering
Writing Project. The goal of which is to investigate
what Civil Engineers in practice write in
successful text. Compare it to what students
write in course, see what the gap is and then
work on minimising that gap. So teaching students
writing skills so that they can be more successful
when they go into practice when they graduate.
I collaborate now with an Engineering faculty
at my own University and then three other
Universities and actually a couple of others
who are a little less involved, but have come
on and we’ve had a couple of grants from
the United States National Science Foundation,
so that we can do some larger things, but
there are many points you’ll see where we
actually do small studies and anyone could
easily do that sort of small study without
having to get a huge amount of funding for
the bigger project that I described.
The way it’s set up is diagrammed here and
I put in bold the parts that I think are most
typical for a corpus project. So first of
all we make a corpus and the original one
has practitioner texts and student texts,
students from 35 courses at 5 Universities
and we’ve practitioner texts from about
50 firms and agencies. Then there’s the
analysis section as you would expect and the
corpus analysis has various grammar features,
word choice, errors and I’ll show you a
couple of examples from that. But then also
rhetorical analysis and holistic evaluation
by practitioners. From that analysis we got
to what are the most problematic features
for the students? Develop teaching materials
to address those features and then use the
material in Civil Engineering classes. So
this isn’t writing class, this is for Civil
Engineering practice. So we integrate them
into the Civil Engineering courses, have students
write papers again and then it goes back into
the analysis, which at this point is the assessment
for have there been any changes in the student
writings since they used those new materials.
So it’s really an assessment of how I define
the materials. And to the side there you’ll
see the box with interviews of practitioners,
students and faculty that inform the analysis
and interpretations and figuring out what’s
important and I’ll talk about those a little
more in a minute.
So what I want to do is give you a couple
of examples of what we learned from the corpus
analysis, which is ‘why Engineers need corpus
linguistics and why linguists’ interpretations
of the findings aren’t enough, so why we
need those interviews’ and then go onto
some explanation of the application where
we’re really trying to address not just
‘so what?’ which is what I always ask
my students, but we’re trying to go onto
‘so what are we doing about it?’ So the
first two parts get kind of integrated into
these next examples. Starting with passive
voice. If you have ever looked at technical
writing manuals or even studies, I put in
quotes ‘of passive voice’, it usually
comes out that either passive voice is some
kind of angelic thing or it’s an agent of
the Devil. So on the one hand it can keep
discourse focused on the object of process
which for a field like Civil Engineering is
what you’re really interested in and it
helps writers avoid sounding obnoxiously egocentric.
Well who wants to sound obnoxiously egocentric
in their writing? OK, this sounds like a good
thing. On the other hand it’s said to be
sneaky because it conceals the agent and long
and boring or in one of my favourite quotes
‘the perfect vehicle for documents that
record material of no intended consequence
to anyone at all’. And you could go to texts,
probably almost any kind of text and find
examples that will support all of these things
really. But as we know what matters is systematic
analysis to try to see how these features
relay function. So rather than looking at
just passive voice main stanzas we thought
let’s get a slightly bigger picture here
of what’s going on with what’s said to
be a very impersonal way of writing in Engineering
and immediately I thought of multi-dimensional
analysis and looking at the impersonal style
of dimension.
Now some of you I know no multi-dimensional
analysis in detail. Some people have heard
it several times over in the conference already,
even if you don’t know it, didn’t know
it already. For those of you who don’t a
very nutshell description is it’s a method
of counting a large number of linguistic features
and then through a factor analysis, which
is a statistical technique, seeing which ones
tend to occur together, so there are groups
of linguistic features that occur together
in texts. And the principle or assumption
underlying it is groups of features work together
for communicative functions in texts. As Andrew
Hardy was saying ‘we don’t just randomly
pick out language pieces from bins randomly,
we have functions that we’re trying to fulfil.’
So that’s underlying idea with multi-dimensional
analysis and in 1988 Doug Bieber did a multi-dimensional
analysis of English using 23 different spoken
and written registers and one of the factors,
so one of those groups of features had the
features you can see listed there, 4 different
kinds of passive structures on this factor
and then 2 features having to do with clause
connections. Now nobody said a priority these
features should be together. This is just
the map of features that co-occur together
in texts. And it was interpreted, so after
you have the factor you interpret the dimension
for what is the communicative function of
it, as impersonal style or some people call
it abstract style. So I thought ‘here is
a way to get one perspective on passives and
impersonal style features in the Civil Engineering
texts’. So we used a small sub-set actually
of the whole corpus set we have to do this
investigation into the passive voice use.
Selecting the texts carefully, because for
the kind of study we’re doing, looking at
the gap between the practitioners and students,
we need to be comparing texts that are rhetorically
similar. It makes no sense to compare texts
that have very different audiences or purposes
and then say ‘oh, they use these features
differently’ because it may just be due
to the audience and purpose. So for the practitioner
reports and the student reports they are very
similar in the rhetorical contexts, written
to clients about specific projects, there
is a problem that has to be solved. We also
have put in 50 journal research articles to
make a comparison with the practitioner reports
because those are the writings that the Engineering
faculty know and aim for. Many of the Engineering
faculty have never worked in industry, even
though about 98% of the students at the schools
I work at want to go into industry. So this
is an example of a place where we could have
actually just thought of designing a small
study to do this. You don’t have to have
a big grant and be on a massive scale.
So the results. The vertical line to the left
is showing you a standardised scale, so zero
which is actually off the slide, is the mean
for the 23 different spoken and written registers
that Bieber was studying and then the higher
up you are on that vertical line the more
frequent use there is of the impersonal style
features. So you can see that the journal
articles and the student reports have a very,
very high frequency of those impersonal style
features. The practitioner reports come out
more like general academic prose and in fact
statistically tested with an ANOVA
shown by the colours, the journal articles
and the student reports had no significant
difference, but the practitioner reports were
significantly different than both of those
other ones. So notice the student reports
that have the rhetorical context very similar
to the practitioner reports are coming out
with many more impersonal style features.
So what’s going on? We look at the texts
first. The practitioner reports that have
fewer, they still have a lot of impersonal
style features, but they have fewer than the
other registers. Well, one thing that happens
is there are human agents with active voice
verbs and I’ve given you an example there.
Things like ‘we recommend’ first person
pronoun, active voice. There are also a lot
of stanzas that have inanimate things as subjects
with active voice census, so these things
do things, like bridges, the bridge will maximise
hydraulic capacity. The journal articles on
the other hand have passives without agents
in many, many more cases, including even with
the same verbs that the practitioners tend
to use in active, like recommends, so a journal
article is more likely to say ‘it is recommended
that’ and even when an individual thing
is really what’s being studied for the research
article, it’s more common that some kind
of general model is the grammatical subject
and then it gets used for passive voice. So
even though in example 4 it’s coming from
an article that’s just about a single bridge
it’s a bridge foundation ground model is
developed, it’s not the bridge doing something.
Also you might have noticed with some of those
practitioner examples already, sentences tend
to have single ideas, they’re just simple
sentences. The journal articles tend to have
many more complex sentences connected with
those subordinators and then also linking
adverbials, showing the overt, overtly showing
a connection between the ideas in sentences.
Now as linguists we could say ‘alright,
I can tell you a lot about what’s going
on here’. So we’ve got these journal articles,
the purpose of which is to talk about a general
concept, a model, to develop that and that’s
why we end up with more passive voice and
the practitioners seem to have some of value
on shorter sentences, being more direct with
agents in some cases, but then it kind of
starts to taper off exactly how much you can
say about, how much do these characteristics
really matter in the context of use? And we’re
trying to understand what goes on in writing
for practice, so it’s important to know.
How important are these characteristics? The
only people who can really tell us that are
the Engineers themselves.
So that’s where we get to the interviews.
And at the point of this analysis that I’m
talking about I had interviewed 15 practitioners,
22 students and 8 faculty members. And mostly
I’m going to talk about the practitioners
and also a little bit about the students.
The practitioners when I would show them samples
of writing and just ask them to comment or
I’d show them alternative ways to word things,
they would come out with comments often about
managing liability in a field where you have
to make subjective judgements. You are hired
to make judgements and you have to make subjective
judgements, it isn’t just facts. But you
don’t want to be responsible and make it
sound like you have made some judgement that
you haven’t made or that somebody else made
and that overtly stating a first person pronoun
or a human, an active voice is one way to
make that very clear. They also mentioned
recommend especially because it has legal
consequences to it. If an Engineer says ‘I
recommend or we recommend’ and stamps it
with their official licence a contractor has
to follow that unless another Engineer changes
it. So it’s another way to be very overt,
nobody can miss it if you say ‘we recommend’.
And one idea per sentence they talk about,
well it’s faster skimming for the clients
and they’d often comment ‘clients don’t
really read everything anyway they just skim
to get ideas’ and even with the having an
inanimate object in active voice sentence
they’d comment about ‘oh faster reading
for the client’. Anything that made faster
reading for the client was a good thing.
Newsflash: Professional writing isn’t the
same as academic journal writing. I put that
on as the Newsflash here and all of you are
thinking ‘well, of course’. But that was
news to the Engineering faculty. And I think
we also need to be careful, especially in
LSP studies and studies of disciplines because
it’s very easy to get academic journal article
samples, generally. And it’s also very easy
to not write up results and conclusions clearly
enough so that you are saying the academic
representation of this discipline is like
this. It’s not all discourse for the discipline.
So the journal article samples don’t equal
the disciplines. Many disciplines are much
wider than the academic contexts, also that’s
of great use too.
OK, what’s happening with the students?
Passives, lots and lots of passives are happening
with the students. So they’re rarely observe
something themselves it’s all things were
observed. ‘Pedestrian activity was noted
and it was recommended’ you never find out
who recommended that. I think it’s actually
the students, but it’s impossible to tell.
Or one of my favourites ‘it was hoped’,
or even more of my favourites number 3 ‘references
found relating to the compaction of soils
for the nature of claimant all changed after
drying compared to using soils without initial
drying was not clearly found’. This becomes
so twisted that it’s actually references
found or not found and the purple underlined
features are ones that are part of the impersonal
style features.
In interviews students would repeatedly say
things like they somewhere had in their mind
this rule that in technical writing you don’t
use I or we or us. Some of them knew they
had heard it in some technical writing class,
most of them had no idea where they had gotten
that idea, but it was firmly entrenched. Or
something like ‘you need to use objective
language’ and I think that corresponds directly
with ‘it was hoped’ so put it in passive
and it makes it sound more objective, which
of course it doesn’t. Or just ‘it looks
better if it’s longer I think it’s as
simple as that’. The students also used
more connecting words and subordinators the
way the journal articles would and this I
think was also related to the ‘it looks
better if it’s longer’ and some of them
would also say if I showed them a sample ‘well,
you just want to make it sound fancy’. Or
in what, I think it was actually quite a revealing
and somewhat insightful comment from one student
‘well, when you don’t know what to do
you just throw up on the paper’
and in fact I think that relates also to the
rhetorical structure that is often a problem
for the students and relates to their using
these connectors, but they aren’t arranging
information about ‘what’s the problem,
what are the current conditions, what are
the alternatives and what’s our preferred
solution?’ They don’t arrange it the way
practitioner texts do which is very linear,
very predictable, it’s hard to misunderstand
a practitioner text. But the students have
things back and forth and all over and I realise
as part of what we’re really studying here
isn’t just the linguistic features we have
to look at the rhetorical organisation. So
that got us into doing rhetorical analysis,
which I’m not going to talk about, but leads
me into making all sorts of crazy looking
maps of rhetorical moves in students’ papers
to show just how un-linear they are.
So my point with all of this is the corpus
study, the multi-dimensional analysis helps
us understand the difference between the student
and practitioner writing quite a bit. The
Interviews however are very important in helping
us understand what we should really be addressing
and how important things are for the practitioners
and why students are doing certain things
and the rhetorical analysis as in to round
up the pictures in ways that wouldn’t be
possible with just a corpus analysis.
OK, let me give you another shorter example
about why Engineers need corpus linguistics
and corpus linguists need Engineers’ input,
having to do with word choice. And I thought
at first with word choices ‘ah, how hard
can it be?’ Well, I ate those words. You
know and I always think ‘right, we’ll
look at the frequency in dispersions, do some
key word analysis maybe, look at a few bundles’.
Here’s just a couple of examples of things
that were coming up, but it was clear this
is not going to be very helpful for our kind
of applied project. We’ve got some items
reflecting different kinds of projects. So
practitioners tend to work on bridges a lot,
especially in the North West because there
is so much water there are just a lot of places
that need bridges. So something like a bridge
comes up. The students love anything that
is in, so anything green, anything renewable,
they’re definitely going to add that to
the paper and round-a-bouts are an up and
coming item in the US, so those get written
about in transportation papers. But I didn’t
see how this was really going to get us on
the way to making useful writing materials
and bundles, one of the side of the, it’s
interesting to a linguist that these kinds
of frames can be so useful in building discourse,
but I didn’t see how I was really going
to be able to use that for writing materials
for these Engineering students. I noticed
at the same time as I was pondering this,
that when I would interview practitioners,
when I showed them examples of student writing
and asked for comments they often commented
on three things having to do with word use,
even if I was trying to focus them on something
else, just as they were reading, it was like
they were compelled to come in on these things.
One was misused terms, so they’d read some
and just say ‘that’s not the dead load’
which at first I couldn’t even understand
what that was. At this point I have a better
idea, but those misused terms they noticed
similar words that were used inaccurately.
So for instance the difference between estimating,
calculating and determining a value for a
variable was very important to some of the
Engineers. And then non-technical words with
potentially serious liability consequences
because they weren’t accurate. So for instance
‘create a safe bicycle crossing’. That
would make a transportation Engineer kind
of have the top of their head blow off. There
is no way to create a safe bicycle crossing
and the only way to have a safe bicycle crossing
is probably no one ever use it, because even
if there were no cars in the area a cyclist
might run into a kerb and fall down and hurt
themselves and then it’s not safe. But I
was still thinking ‘OK, I see these patterns
and what they’re commenting on but how on
earth is it possible to make this practical
enough to do the analysis we want to do and
be able to do the assessment and materials
after we figure out what it is we’re going
to do anyway?’ And I knew that the Engineering
faculty already commented on misuse of technical
terms and I certainly couldn’t rely on linguists
to recognise them, so that was kind of out.
There wasn’t enough context to judge some
of the near synonym choices. And then, even
for that last category every word has the
potential to be inaccurate or imprecise or
ineffective. So I thought ‘oh’ I just
didn’t know how to grapple with this. But
I would look at student papers and for instance,
from a senior level report, a Capstone course,
these students are about to graduate and they’ll
say things like ‘a project like this take
great coordination and planning to make sure
de, de, de’ and even just a few months into
the project, even to me this kind of thing
was raising alarm bells. So I thought ‘OK,
I can come up with a suspect word list of
words that are not technical, but are often
misused, vague, absolute, superfluous, just
typically inaccurate or often inaccurate’
and I came up with a list of 45 words and
phrases and from looking at papers, talking
with Engineers about what they saw. But as
I looked I noticed that even those suspects
could be used accurately and appropriately.
So ‘if you have questions please call us’,
that’s fine. Hot and cold water pipes, usually
hot and cold they’re way too vague, but
for pipes that’s fine. I thought at least
safe will be safe, but no, it turns out it’s
a kind of analysis that has a software acronym
with it.
So as we’ve heard several times in talks,
back to the concordance listings and looking
at the context. So I checked every suspect
in context, I or someone else and do an
[inerator] liability check with the practitioner
to make sure that what we’re judging as
effective is the same as what they would judge.
And in one study of this that we ran with
practitioner reports and tech memos and students,
senior level reports and tech memos and then
lab reports of the junior level students,
indeed there is a significant difference between
the student writing and the practitioner writing.
I included the junior level and senior level
and allied them by themselves first to see
what was going on, because one of the faculty
members who I work with, Clive, it’s really
just a matter of maturity. He said ‘students
get more mature and they use words more accurately’.
I’m not sure I believe that, plus I think
we could help them along and it turned out
their first time junior level lab reports
were not different than the senior level student
ones.
Let’s in the interest of time, I think not
talk about the error analysis, but if you
are interested in error analysis I would be
happy to talk about it more in the question
time. The short idea, or I didn’t want to
do it, but there were so many that I decided
I had better and the student papers have a
lot of errors in just basic, standard written
English.
OK, let’s go to the application. So we are
really trying to get to ‘so what are we
doing about this?’ The new teaching materials.
So this is moving from description to evaluation
and advice, really out of the realm of corpus
linguistics and into application of what we’re
finding from the findings and I have to tell
you immediately alarms were going off for
me. A caution sign or one of my favourite
signs from Portland the ‘uh-oh, we’re
about to have a disaster here’ or even ‘help,
I’m going to slide down this slippery slope,
end up drowning’. On the other hand I would
look at the advice that was given to students,
even hand books that are in there 4th edition
or 5th edition, there is a lot of bad advice.
A lot of it is completely decontextualized,
a lot of it is misleading about choices in
English. So if we go back to the verb voice,
passives, so one ‘avoid nominalisation from
the passive voice whenever possible’, well,
that’s pretty straightforward, just avoid
it. But a site that is highly regarded that
do writing labs for Engineering reports, methodology
is written in passive voice, just no buts,
the answer if or buts. OK. And then from a
very popular handbook for students ‘sentences
become more vigorous, direct and efficient
in the active form by showing that a person
is involved in the work, you’re doing no
more that admitting reality’. OK, so it
sounds like we should use active voice for
methods. But then another handbook ‘we need
the passive voice, it stops us from repeatedly
having to use I or we or some other agent’.
What on earth a student or anybody else would
make of this collection of advice I have no
idea. Well, I have some idea because I see
the papers that result from it. But also one
of the things that really bothers me is the
advice misrepresents English so much. There
are so many more choices than just having
passive voice or a human agent, an active.
So it’s really a disservice to the students.
So I said ‘alright, we can do this, dive
into the teaching materials’ and we have
developed teaching materials that address
the language choices which are really the
things that come out of the corpus analysis,
things like choosing between active and passive.
We also have genre based lessons that come
largely out of the rhetorical analysis and
then also grammar and mechanics lessons, which
also come out of the corpus analysis. And
the typical process is by the first draft,
usually by a linguist, usually by me with
Engineering faculty collaboration, but I have
found this is the most efficient way to go
about it. I’ve had some of the Engineers
I collaborate with, Engineering faculty do
a first draft after I give them some results
and it just leads into a longer process. So
usually I draft the unit. Then I get comments
from the Engineering faculty, from other linguists
and two Engineering practitioners to make
sure anything we’re saying, even if it’s
made simpler for students, doesn’t give
bad advice for practice. So even if it has
to be simplified at least it’s leading down
the right road. Then revisions to the units
and revisions and revisions, piloting what
the students and more revisions and more revisions.
And when we’re generally happy enough with
it we make a webcast to introduce the written
unit and there’s a whole other story with
the webcast actually, which I’m not going
to go into right now, but again if you’d
like to hear about that ask me.
So one of the things we try to do is teach
students how to make choices and we again
and again, every single unit says writing
is about judgement, it’s just like Engineering.
You’ve learned that you can’t do Engineering
without exercising judgement and it’s just
like that with writing. Nobody can just give
you rules. So this is a little piece from
a unit about choosing between active and passive
and we give them examples of what practitioners
tend to do, with explanation of what they’re
supposed to see in the examples. We learned
a quick way that they need explanation pointing
out exactly what they’re supposed to see
and where and why practitioners are arguing
what they do.
We do directly warn against a few structures,
like what we call, we also simplify language
for them, the empty ‘it’ passive voice
sentences, ‘it was noticed, it was observed’
and warn them against those saying they are
rarely effective. We make sure they can recognise
those structures because we also learned through
trial and error even when students thought
they knew what a certain structure was they
often did not. And we give them specific techniques
for revising. So it’s not just ‘don’t
use that’ it’s ‘well, consider would
this be more effective with a first person
pronoun and active voice?’ or if it’s
something like ‘it was observed’ you might
just be able to say ‘during our observation’
and then just say what happened. So we give
them alternatives they can use.
We also put in some simple corpus analysis
results, but nothing as complicated as say
the multi-dimensional analysis. So that gets
reduced down to just percentage of simple
sentences to show the students, practitioners,
really do use a lot more just simple sentences.
And we also counter misconceptions that we’ve
heard many times in interviews and we call
them the myth buster boxes. So this one for
instance is ‘isn’t passive voice better
because it makes writing sound objective’
and we just come right out and say ‘no,
that’s the wrong idea’. Here’s another
example from the word choice unit, again,
specific, techniques, here’s a sentence
that needs to be revised, here’s the revision
of it, exemplified, long to me, explanation
of points you’re supposed to notice. But
again, when we didn’t have the explanation,
for instance this is the sense with great
coordination, I actually worked with a class
using this unit and a student called me over
and said ‘so how about if I just say good
instead of great’ and they just didn’t
get the idea of what was wrong with great.
So more explanation and showing them like
detailed coordination is probably what the
writer means here. And we emphasise in the
word choice unit precision and accuracy of
meaning, because this idea of style does not
serve the students well or give some idea
of ‘oh, use a formal style’ it’s kind
of a ‘be fancy’ sort of thing and it just
does not result in effective texts. And the
goal is really unambiguous, accurate meaning.
I also do some workshops for practicing Engineers
now. Engineers that I was collaborating with
asked me to come into their firms and with
them I go even more into linguistic principles.
So here’s just a quick piece of a slide
and I really introduced them to the principle
of end weight and we use that to talk about
how can you make a choice between active and
passive voice when end weight is one of your
considerations. And we go through other considerations
also.
So we make those teaching materials and then
we try them out with the students and the
students are writing their regular assignments
for classes, as usual, we collect the assignments,
the post intervention assignments as we call
them, after they’ve used the teaching materials,
do all those analyses again and so far it’s
almost kind of embarrassing but every quantitative
analysis has come out with syntactic structures
of improvement for the students. And the holistic
analysis by the practitioner also has come
out with syntactic structures of improvement,
which to me is a very important measure because
sometimes you can improve individual features
but it doesn’t add up to greater effectiveness
overall.
So I’m very pleased with how the results
are going and also by student comments that
show they are thinking about the kinds of
things we want them to think about, even if
they have trouble getting it into writing
sometimes, at least they know things like
they’re impressed by how precise Engineering
writing has to be or that there’s no such
thing as a synonym, so if students are at
least knowing they have to think about their
word choice carefully. And that we don’t
study the faculty at all. There are some positive
faculty comments like how much easier it is
to grade papers after you actually teach some
writing skills beforehand.
So I’m pleased, but let’s talk about the
challenge of it all. And here we get back
to the cable staid bridges, which I think
are just the most elegant structures probably
in all of human structures. The flow of them
usually is really pretty. They have all these
parallel cables that look kind of
delicate, but then they work together and
make a very strong structure. Even like that
one on the left, I’m sorry that picture
is even worse than it looked in person, it’s
actually it’s quite a smoggy day in Bangkok.
But even on a smoggy day and the buildings
they weren’t very pretty, that cable staid
bridge just rises above it as this elegant
structure. And that’s the way I envision
the whole project. From the beginning that’s
how envision the whole project and then I
started working on it and rather than a cable
staid bridge, it was really more like a plate
of spaghetti that was a total mess and somehow
I was supposed to get those spaghetti strands
to make themselves into a cable staid bridge.
And then I worked it some and it seemed like
it kind of turned into a plate of cooked spaghetti,
like things are getting more complicated and
harder to sort out. And a project of this
sort has so many different pieces to it, different
people working on it, it would be deceptive
of me to say it doesn’t really feel like
the spaghetti rather than the bridge sometimes.
But let’s talk about taking up the challenge
and why I think it is possible to do this
sort of work and have good results and should
you be interested these are kind of my tips
from my experience. One, relationships with
experts in the discipline and the specific
context of work it it’s academic or not,
are very important, crucial. Marriage I think
is not required, it worked for me, but someway
in it is important, but I think even more
important part of it is time. At least for
somebody like me, I am not naturally very
social and I don’t go in and make friends
right away. But I think for a lot of other
researchers too there’s this element of
time when you’re working with people and
you have to build up the relationship and
get their trust. It was probably two to three
years into the project and first my husband
gave me connections and then I talked to some
other Engineer who would send me to some other
Engineer and I just started networking that
way. So two and half to three years into the
project my husband came home from two different
meetings a few weeks apart and he said, sounding
sort of cranky about it, that he had sat down
by somebody he didn’t know and talked to
that person and a couple of minutes into the
conversation the person said ‘oh you know,
I think I know your wife’ and I thought
‘ah, I am getting into this community of
Engineers’. I would also encourage people
to consider working outside of academia, even
though I think it takes an extra little motivation
sometimes because we tend to know academia
and it’s closer around us, but there are
many, many non-academic needs and corpus linguists
are the people to investigate more about the
language needs. I think it’s also important
as part of the relationships to choose venues
for dissemination thoughtfully. So for instance
not too long ago I went to a conference called
the Structures Congress and you might hear
that and think ‘oh structures, grammatical
structures, syntactic structures’. No. It’s
building and bridges and how do you make things
safe for earthquakes and I could not understand
really any session except my own. But I got
a very good reception at it and it gave me
the opportunity to recruit more people for
the study. I just said ‘and if you like
this work and you wouldn’t mind reading
some student papers and doing a holistic evaluation
of it, give me your business cards’. And
something like that gave me more people to
collaborate with.
Another point of success, as I was saying
at the beginning is corpus plus other analysis
techniques often just the linguistic corpus
study doesn’t speak enough to people outside
of linguistics. What’s going on rhetorically,
what is going on in a bigger context of interviews,
getting incorporation of more perspectives
is very important for this kind of work. I
think also being willing to accept feasible,
useful solutions which maybe aren’t the
most glamourous or best sounding research
but still do the job. So for instance with
the word choice analysis my first thought
was ‘I cannot possibly tell a group of corpus
linguists that I just studied 45 suspect words’
the in thought ‘why not, that’s what worked?’
and has proved really useful for making the
teaching materials and helping students move
on the path they need to move on in their
writing. And then also moving from the functional
descriptions that we’re used to, to evaluative
advice. So getting to that ‘so what do we
do about this an diving in and trying it’
and it certainly is not like all our first
drafts are successful, but it is satisfying
seeing an impact.
So I am happy to give out the slides and if
you’d like to get a copy here are a few
references, if you wanted to find out more.
And there are many people in the National
Science Foundation that I give thanks to for
making the project possible and thanks to
all of you for your attention and I’ll leave
you with the image of the Tilikum
Crossing in Portland, which is our newest
cable staid bridge, so you can have the image
of a project that is elegant and all the cables
are working together to make it stronger.
Thank you very much.
