Studies conducted on first and second language student writing in English have pointed to the latter group's high use of features such as informal language, pronouns, and linking adverbials, yet few studies have been conducted on assessed undergraduate writing produced within an English-speaking environment. This paper reports findings from a corpus study of Chinese and British students' writing in UK universities, confirming that a key area of difference is the Chinese students' higher use of particular linking adverbials (e.g., besides, on the other hand). We hypothesise that one reason for this higher usage is the influence of secondary school teaching materials in mainland China prior to UK university study and examine a set of model texts from the English paper in the Chinese university entrance test, selected as these texts comprise much of the teaching material in the final year of secondary education. We argue that Chinese students are "primed" (Hoey, 2005) to favour particular linking adverbials, to disregard issues of informality, and to prefer sentence-initial positioning. It is hoped that the reported findings will challenge English language teachers and textbook writers to consider the requirements of writing within the academy.Keywords: Chinese students; teaching materials; corpus linguistics; linking adverbials; intensive reading lesson; National Matriculation Test. 2 IntroductionStudents from China are increasingly choosing to study at undergraduate level in English-speaking countries; in the UK, Chinese people now comprise the "largest single overseas student group" with more than 90,000 Chinese students engaged in learning in the UK (the British Council, 2011). However, relatively few large-scale studies have been carried out on the assessed undergraduate writing of this group within English-speaking contexts; instead, the majority of large-scale studies of both Chinese 1 students' writing and non-native speaker (NNS 2 ) student writing in general have been corpus studies concentrating on data sets of unassessed, extremely short, argumentative essays collected mainly from non-UK universities. While these "learner corpus" studies have yielded useful insights into L2English students' writing, it is unclear how far the findings can be extended to longer pieces of assessed writing.A common assertion of learner corpus studies is that NNSs "overuse," "under- English-speaking context, and this paper aims to address this gap. The dataset for 1 While it is recognised that the term 'Chinese students' refers to a range of geographical locations, dialects and ethnic groups, the majority of students in the study are from the PRC. Moreover, the contextual data in the corpus used in this study (BAWE) details only the student's self-proclaimed L1 (for many Chinese students this is simply 'Chinese'), and does not request information on perceived ethnicity. The group termed 'L1 English' or 'British' students gave English as their L1 and undertook all or most of their secondary education in the UK. 2 In this pap...

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Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or “paperwork.” We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable phenomenon—how much time is spent on writing? (b) as a textual dimension to social work writing—how do institutional documents drive particular entextualizations of time and how do social worker texts entextualize time? (c) as a particular timespace configuration of lived experience—how is time experienced by professional social workers? Findings indicate that a dominant institutional chronotope is governing social work textual practice underpinned by an ideology of writing that is at odds with social workers’ desired practice and professional goals. Methodologically, this article illustrates the value of combining a range of data and analytic tools, using textual and contextual data as well as qualitative and quantitative frames of analysis.

Previous research has indicated that social workers are portrayed negatively in the UK press, particularly in child protection cases. But what is the nature of this negativity? And are social workers also mentioned in more positive contexts? To explore these questions, a collection of three months of newspaper articles was compiled (early May to early August 2019), using the seed term ‘social worker(s)’. Almost 1,000 occurrences were located and categorised as ‘positive’ (6 per cent of instances), ‘negative’ (25 per cent) or ‘neutral’ (69 per cent). Further classification of negative instances indicates these concern social workers’ perceived failure to act rather than perceived over-zealous behaviour (ratio 5:2). Findings also suggest that the press tend to hold social workers to a higher moral standard in their everyday lives than is the case for other members of society. Understanding how social workers are portrayed in the press is important for practitioners in terms of recruitment, job satisfaction and retention. In addition, as newspapers are the major source of information on social work for members of the public, greater awareness could reduce the societal tendency towards finding individuals to blame.