Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on

Sardinha, Tony Berber; Pinto, Marcia Veirano

doi:10.1075/scl.60

Cited by 53 publications

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“…This study is part of a larger project that is analyzing student and practitioner writing in civil engineering and developing teaching materials to improve undergraduate students' preparation for writing in industry (Conrad, Pfeiffer, & Szymoniak, 2012;Conrad, 2014;Conrad, 2015;Conrad, Kitch, Pfeiffer, Smith, & Tocco, 2015;Conrad, Kitch, Rhoulac Smith, Lamb, & Pfeiffer, 2016). The writing investigated here is part of the first phase of the project, which investigated student papers and practitioner documents before new teaching materials were introduced.…”

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comparison of Practitioner and Student Writing in Civil Engineering

Conrad

2017

J of Engineering Edu

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Background Numerous studies have identified a gap between the writing skills of engineering program graduates and the demands of writing in the workplace; however, few studies have analyzed the writing of practitioners and students to better understand that gap and inform teaching materials.Purpose This study sought to compare word-level, sentence-level, and organizational differences in writing by practitioners and students and to identify differences that are important for engineering practice. I also sought to demonstrate the untapped potential for linguistic analyses to contribute to understanding engineering writing.Design/Method I used techniques from applied linguistics -corpus linguistics and rhetorical move analysis -supplemented with interviews of practitioners and students. The analysis investigated the interaction of language features, their functions, and writers' motivations.Results Student writing had more complicated sentence structures, less accurate word choice, more errors in grammar and punctuation, and less linear organization. These characteristics decreased effectiveness in areas that practitioners considered important: accurate and unambiguous content; fast, predicable reading; liability management; and attention to detail. Underlying the student writing problems were misconceptions about effective writing, ignorance of genre expectations, weak language skills, and a failure to appreciate that written words, not just calculations, express engineering content. ConclusionsThe findings better define the gap between student and practitioner writing, and are a basis for instructional materials that target important student writing weaknesses. Journal of Engineering EducationV C 2017 ASEE.

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Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comparison of Practitioner and Student Writing in Civil Engineering

Conrad

2017

J of Engineering Edu

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“…With this evidence in mind, I continued to examine practitioner and student writing in this study, focusing specifically on vocabulary words that are important for practitioners' work and examining how these words are used in civil engineering writing. Environmental Engineering program plan to go into industry practice after graduating (Conrad, 2014(Conrad, , 2015.…”

Section: The Civil Engineering Writing Project the Civil Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Analytical System for Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary for Data-Driven Learning: An Example from Civil Engineering

Otto¹

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Data-driven learning (DDL), an inductive teaching approach in which students learn through corpus interaction, has gained recent traction as way to teach specialized vocabulary in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. There is little research, however, that addresses how to choose specialized vocabulary for teaching with DDL.This study addressed this gap in research by exploring the potential of a three-part analytical, corpus-based system for determining vocabulary to teach with DDL for a specific context of language use. This system included (1) identifying words that were significantly more frequent in a specialized expert corpus than in a corpus of general English, (2) narrowing to words that showed patterned differences in use between the specialized corpus and a student corpus, and (3) narrowing further to words with salient enough patterns of usage to teach with DDL. This three-part system was applied to the context of civil engineering in order to find vocabulary words to teach civil engineering students with low-proficiency writing skills at Portland State University.For the first step in my analytical system, I found 201 words that occurred significantly more frequently in civil engineering practitioner writing than in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and that met requirements for frequency, distribution, and other criteria. I tested the second and third steps on 45 of these words and identified 14 words that showed evidence of needing to be taught and being well suited to DDL.After reflecting on my process, I found that the analytical system was successful in meeting my goals for finding civil engineering vocabulary for data-driven activities. I ii also made several observations that may be useful for ESP teachers who are interested in applying this methodology for their classes, the most notable of which were:1. The system was especially useful for connecting words that are not explicitly civil engineering themed (e.g., encountered or using) to important writing functions that civil engineers perform.2. Although it provided a systematic basis for vocabulary teaching decisions, the process was generally time-consuming and required complex judgments, which indicated that it may only be worth performing if teachers plan to regularly incorporate DDL vocabulary instruction into their course.iii Acknowledgments

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Corpus Analysis of Business English

Friginal¹,

Udell²

2022

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

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Business English, also referred to as international business English or business English as a lingua franca, pertains to spoken and written language used in commercial, transactional, and often for‐profit workplace contexts. It encompasses a wide variety of registers, such as letters, memos, e‐mails, text messages or SMSs, print and broadcast news, multimodal presentations, conference calls, workplace interactions, social media and Internet‐based texts, reports, prospectuses, white papers, and responses to customer‐initiated correspondence or phone calls. Nearly 90% of all international business proceedings and e‐commerce transactions are now conducted in English, and the number of high‐profile, multinational corporations that have adopted English‐only policies for important business communications continues to increase. This entry focuses on the applications of corpus linguistic (CL) approaches in the linguistic analysis of business English. It provides a summary of several well‐known corpora of business English across written and spoken registers and discusses results of related analyses. Expanding research in oral or spoken business discourse in CL is highlighted, together with a sample study of business English in telephone‐based interactions using corpus‐based multidimensional analysis (MDA). The MDA framework was developed by Douglas Biber in establishing the statistical co‐occurrence of part‐of‐speech‐tagged linguistic features from corpora. The concept of linguistic co‐occurrence, which is the foundation of MDA, can be introduced by pointing out intuitively the common differences (or similarities) in the linguistic composition of various types of spoken or written business registers.

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Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on

Cited by 53 publications

References 0 publications

A Comparison of Practitioner and Student Writing in Civil Engineering

A Comparison of Practitioner and Student Writing in Civil Engineering

An Analytical System for Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary for Data-Driven Learning: An Example from Civil Engineering

Corpus Analysis of Business English

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