Speaking and Writing in the University: A Multidimensional Comparison

Abstract

The dozens of studies on academic discourse carried out over the past 20 years have mostly focused on written academic prose (usually the technical research article in science or medicine) or on academic lectures. Other registers that may be more important for students adjusting to university life, such as textbooks, have received surprisingly little attention, and spoken registers such as study groups or on‐campus service encounters have been virtually ignored. To explain more fully the nature of the tasks that incoming international students encounter, this article undertakes a comprehensive linguistic description of the range of spoken and written registers at U.S. universities. Specifically, the article describes a multidimensional analysis of register variation in the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. The analysis shows that spoken registers are fundamentally different from written ones in university contexts, regardless of purpose. Some of the register characterizations are particularly surprising. For example, classroom teaching was similar to the conversational registers in many respects, and departmental brochures and Web pages were as informationally dense as textbooks. The article discusses the implications of these findings for pedagogy and future research.

Exploring nominalization in scientific textbooks: A cross-disciplinary study of hard and soft sciences

“…This academic discourse is featured as abstract, lexically dense in comparison with informal spoken language, elaborated in nominal groups, extensive in relational processes, impersonal and evaluative (Biber, 1988(Biber, , 2006Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd & Helt, 2002;Christie & Derewianka, 2008;Halliday, 1993a;Hyland, 2009;Schleppegrell, 2004b). To engender the above-mentioned features of academic language, SFL identifies a powerful language resource that "simultaneously builds cohesion, foregrounds meanings in static nominal groups, and backgrounds personal and subjective voice" (Liardét, 2013: 163).…”

Multi-Dimensional Analysis, text constellations, and interdisciplinary discourse

“…In common with Biber et al (2002), Biber et al (2004), Biber (2006) and Gray (2013), among other studies, the project reported in this paper uses multidimensional analysis (MDA) to investigate academic discourse in English, but it involves a number of innovations. The corpus used is relatively specific, consisting of only written texts, only research papers published in international academic journals, and only papers about environmental change and associated fields.…”

‘You’ and ‘I’ in university seminars and spoken learner discourse

“…The high ranking of the pronouns you and I across both corpora are indicative of the interactive nature of the face-to-face educational contexts from which the texts were gathered (Fortanet, 2004;Carter and McCarthy, 2006). Although spoken academic discourse is thought to be highly informational, I and you mark the conversational aspects of spoken academic discourse (Biber et al, 2002).). As evidenced in Table 1, there is frequent use of the hesitation marker 'uh'.…”