FYC corpus: an introduction and overview, with preliminary findings

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

Daniel Kies

Department of English College of DuPage

CCCC 2014

Indianapolis 20 March 2014

The Genesis of the Project

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.

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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 4 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

The Genesis of the Project

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 5 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

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

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The Genesis of the Project

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 7 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

The Genesis of the Project

For example, Clive Thompson summarizing the L&L Standford Writing Project study: “Technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it— and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.” Bauerlein in the CHE concludes of the same study: “I think we can say that instead of dispelling fears about the impact of technology on student writing, the Lunsford study raises them to a new level.” Mark Bauerlein, 2008, “The Lunsfords on Student Writing” Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com.cod.idm.oclc.org/blogs/brainstorm/the-lunsfords-on-student writing/6148 8 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

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The Genesis of the Project 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.

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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

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The Genesis of the Project Fears for the future of writing (2)

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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.

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“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 10 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

The Genesis of the Project

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. 11 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

The Genesis of the Project

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.

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The Genesis of the Project

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 13 WRAB III Paris, France 19 February 2014

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?

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Methodology (1)

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).

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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) 16 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

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.  17 The T2K-SWAL corpus provides a useful backdrop against which to compare student writing, but it does not examine the texts of novice writers. CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Methodology (4)

Techniques:  Compare student corpora against the academic registers in corpora.byu.edu (Mark Davies)  That corpus focuses largely on cross-disciplinary, academic journal articles. 18 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 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).

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Claims for writing (2) The theoretical notion of register ( field ,

mode

and tenor ) from systemic functional linguistics postulates a number of features that distinguish orality i.e. “very spoken” or conversational English from “very written” genres such as academic texts.

(Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) 20 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Claims for writing (3)

Some markers of orality are: in terms of field ,  a tendency to focus on subjective experience; 21 in mode ,  reduction in social distance between interlocuters; in tenor ,  a tendency to focus on subjective experience;    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

).

(Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Claims for writing (4)

 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.

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More recent research since Biber 1988

 Spoken/written dichotomy is inadequate.

 Biber et al. (2006) proposed seven dimensions academic discourse in the university context:  that cut across “a fundamental oral/literate opposition” … holds between spoken and written modes “regardless of purpose, interactiveness, or other pre-planning considerations.” (Biber, 2006, p. 186). 23 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Characteristics of spoken vs written text in academic contexts

 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% active in written academic registers and 90% in spoken registers.) 24 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Spoken vs written registers

 Biber et al. (2002) found “strong polarization between spoken and written registers.” Demarked as “dimensions.” 25 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).

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University registers

(Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd, and Helt, 2002) Written (e.g. textbooks, syllabi, administrative info.) Information-dense (D1) Non-narrative focus (D2) Elaborated reference (D3) Little overt persuasion (D4) Impersonal style (D5) Spoken (e.g. lectures, labs. study groups, office hrs) Involvement and interaction Non-narrative focus (D2) Situated reference More overt persuasion Less impersonal in style To study ‘orality,’ I concentrated on the syntactic patterns that mark Dimension 1 in the table above.

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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: 27 “informational density and complex noun phrase structures (frequent nouns and nominalizations, prepositional phrases, adjectives, and relative causes) as well as passive constructions” (p. 186.) CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Dimension 1: Oral vs Literate discourse (Biber et al. 2004)

POSITIVE LOADING

contractions, pronouns, verbs, adverbials

Contractions Pronouns: demonstrative Pronouns: it Pronouns:1st person

Verbs: present tense

Adverbials: time Adverbs: common Pronouns: indefinite That-omission

NEGATIVE LOADING

nouns, adjectives, passives

Nouns: nominalizations Word length Prepositional phrases Adjectives: attributive

Passives: agentless Passives: postnominal

Type/token ratio Common adjectives: relational Relative clauses CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Results: Common Assertions 1 (Smileys & Emoji)

 No emoticons appeared in the corpus, except in one paper: a paper about internet related language changes  For example, see the opening of the student’s paper: ____________________________________________ Textspeak Has the Sustenance Teenagers Want Textspeak; Netspeak; Chatspeak; these names are given to the “language” of text messaging and instant messaging, but these terms all have the same origin: Newspeak. … 29 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Results: Common Assertions 2 (txtng abbr)

No abbreviations related to text (SMS) messages appeared in the corpus, e.g.: AAMOF ADN AFAIA AFAIC AFAIK BTW CU CUL DEB 30 gf GMTA HTH IC IIRC ITSFWI IMO IMCO IMHO LOL NBD NOYL NTYMI OIC OOTQ PITA PTB POV RO(T)FL ROFLMAO RTFM SEP SNAFU STFU TIA TOBG TPTB TTFN TTUL TYVM WB WRT WYSIWYG WTG YGLT YMMV CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of Orality 1: Contractions

The number of contractions decreased by a factor of 10 between 1998 and 2013:   Total contractions 1998-99 subcorpus: 1183 Total contractions 2012-13 subcorpus: 193 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of Orality 2: Pronoun it

The number of instances decreased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 subcorpus: 4240 Total in 2012-13 subcorpus: 3262 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of Orality 3: Demonstrative Pronouns

The number of instances decreased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 13723 Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 9451 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of Orality 4: Pro-verb do

The number of instances decreased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 2377 Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 1363 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of Orality 5: First person pronouns

The number of instances decreased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 6345 Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 3889 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of “very written” Text 1: Nominalization

The number of instances increased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 3796 Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 5851 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of “very written” Text 2: Word length

The number of instances 1.3 million words between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 4.730 characters/word 504320 total word count Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 4.934 characters/word 406281 total word count CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of “very written” Text 3: Prepositional phrases

The number is insignificant between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 87079 (0.172 prep/total word count) 504320 total word count Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 57114 (0.141 prep/total word count) 406281 total word count CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of “very written” Text 4: Passives

The number of instances increased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 7740 Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus: 12983 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Marker of “very written” Text 5: Attributive Adjectives

The number of instances increased between 1998 and 2013:   Total in 1998-99 sub-corpus: 1537 Total in 2012-13 sub-corpus : 3847 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Comparison of lexemes across word classes

Feature

1998-9 research papers 449,706 words

% of total (Frequency/1,000 words)

2012-13 research papers 363,157 words

% of total (Frequency/1,000 words)

Noun 32.72% (327) 32.60% (326) Verb Adjective Pronoun Adverb 16.23% (162) 0.37% (4) 4.75% (47) 3.99% (40) Preposition 10.71% (107) Conjunction 3.19% (32) 16.53% (165) 0.37% (4) 4.52% (45) 4.06% (41) 11.09% (111) 3.29% (33) 41 CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Comparison of lexemes with “Orwell” corpora

Feature

Noun Adjective attrib.

Biber 1998 Academic prose

188

76.9

Biber 1998 Face-to-face conversation

Frequency/1,000 words

137.4

40.8

Preposition Conjunction Verb (past) Verb (pres) Pronoun (pers.) Adverb

139.5

3.0

21.9

63.7

5.8

51.8

85.0

0.3

37.4

128.4

39.3

86.0

42 FYC 1998-99 (2012-13)

207 (205)

3.7(4) (Comp. and super) 107 (111)

32 (33)

27.5 (25) 49.1 (49.7) (45) 40 (41) CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Results: Interjections

  corpus.byu.edu (Academic prose [journal articles]) SECTION

2005-2009

# TOKENS

6031

SIZE

102,046,528

PER MILLION

59.10

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Results: Interjections

Orwell 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% CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Results: Interjections

Orwell 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% CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

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Conclusions (1)

Uses of texting and emoji as the return of the Rebus principle (representing language by means of a symbol).

The rebus marks intellectual leap that every literate culture and individual will make when moving from pre-literate to literate states (Ong’s “primary literacy”))  Above: a message from a child, age 4, incorporating rebuses as she is just beginning to learn that symbols can represent words, letters of the alphabet, and the sounds of speech.

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Conclusions (2)

The return of the Rebus principle as a commonly used shortcut in communication systems, which we use everyday whenever we use technology mediated communication (smart phones and browsers) Here, we see modern examples of Ong’s “secondary literacy.” CCCC 2014 Indianapolis 20 March 2014

Selected References

Biber, 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.

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Contact Information

Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage 425 Fawell Boulevard Glen Ellyn, Illinois 60137, USA

[email protected]

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