HOW TO USE CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. John McH. Sinclair (Ed.). Amsterdam. Benjamins, 2004. Pp... more HOW TO USE CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. John McH. Sinclair (Ed.). Amsterdam. Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vi + 306. $114.00 cloth, $42.95 paper. This is the 12th volume in Benjamins' estimable Studies in corpus linguistics series and has been edited by Sinclair, in many ways the doyen of the field. After an introduction by the editor, the collection is divided into five sections. The first four cover “The Corpus and the Teacher,” “Resources—Corpora,” “Research,” and “Resources—Computing” and contain a total of eleven papers. The final section contains a single long essay by Sinclair, entitled “Prospects.” As these headings indicate, the range of this volume is somewhat broader than a perusal of its title alone might indicate.
If I may paraphrase Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for more than 4... more If I may paraphrase Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for more than 40 years I have been engaged in a process of situated rhetorical action without really knowing it. This is what we do when we write, according to CN Candlin,general series editor of ...
ABSTRACT The most common difficulty facing the teacher of Service English is low priority in time... more ABSTRACT The most common difficulty facing the teacher of Service English is low priority in timetabling. This article describes the problems this causes and an attempt to circumvent them by organizing a short intensive course for overseas postgraduates at the University of Aston in Birmingham. It discusses the problems and principles of preparing material for this course, with illustrations of the material used. Finally, the article discusses the lessons that might be learnt from the experience.
As the previous chapters in this volume have made amply clear, the last few years have seen a con... more As the previous chapters in this volume have made amply clear, the last few years have seen a considerable increase in work related to our understanding of the roles, forms, and processes of professional communication and of the complex of forces that give rise to those roles, forms, and processes. The reasons for this upsurge of interest are doubtless manifold. Some are related to administrators' felt needs to keep “channels of communication open” in the face of exponential information growth and the increasing bureaucratlzation of many professions. One consequence of this is that lines of research funding are obtainable relatively easily for communication studies in such areas as scientific research, medicine, business, law, and military affairs.
HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2017
Institutional genres often form dynamic systems or chains. In this paper we report on a possible ... more Institutional genres often form dynamic systems or chains. In this paper we report on a possible expansion of the genre system that undergirds the appointment process of assistant professors in the U.S. This expansion consists of a “response letter” to a letter of recommendation. We first analyse a small corpus of these response letters by looking at the openings and closings and the bodies of the letters. The larger aim of this analysis is to explore the possible rationales that might underlie the composition, stylistic character and content of these texts.
This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by f... more This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of variation in citation practice in the biology subcorpus. To that end, it explores citation practices from a number of perspectives, including the distribution of integral versus parenthetical citations, the choice of reporting verbs, the effect of citing system, and the occurrence of selected features such as the use of citees’ first names. Results show little difference between the undergraduate and graduate papers, some effect of the citing system, and a somewhat richer intertextuality in the “evolutionary” as opposed to the “molecular” biology papers. Overall, this is an impressive body of student work from the viewpoint of textual variat...
HOW TO USE CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. John McH. Sinclair (Ed.). Amsterdam. Benjamins, 2004. Pp... more HOW TO USE CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. John McH. Sinclair (Ed.). Amsterdam. Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vi + 306. $114.00 cloth, $42.95 paper. This is the 12th volume in Benjamins' estimable Studies in corpus linguistics series and has been edited by Sinclair, in many ways the doyen of the field. After an introduction by the editor, the collection is divided into five sections. The first four cover “The Corpus and the Teacher,” “Resources—Corpora,” “Research,” and “Resources—Computing” and contain a total of eleven papers. The final section contains a single long essay by Sinclair, entitled “Prospects.” As these headings indicate, the range of this volume is somewhat broader than a perusal of its title alone might indicate.
If I may paraphrase Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for more than 4... more If I may paraphrase Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for more than 40 years I have been engaged in a process of situated rhetorical action without really knowing it. This is what we do when we write, according to CN Candlin,general series editor of ...
ABSTRACT The most common difficulty facing the teacher of Service English is low priority in time... more ABSTRACT The most common difficulty facing the teacher of Service English is low priority in timetabling. This article describes the problems this causes and an attempt to circumvent them by organizing a short intensive course for overseas postgraduates at the University of Aston in Birmingham. It discusses the problems and principles of preparing material for this course, with illustrations of the material used. Finally, the article discusses the lessons that might be learnt from the experience.
As the previous chapters in this volume have made amply clear, the last few years have seen a con... more As the previous chapters in this volume have made amply clear, the last few years have seen a considerable increase in work related to our understanding of the roles, forms, and processes of professional communication and of the complex of forces that give rise to those roles, forms, and processes. The reasons for this upsurge of interest are doubtless manifold. Some are related to administrators' felt needs to keep “channels of communication open” in the face of exponential information growth and the increasing bureaucratlzation of many professions. One consequence of this is that lines of research funding are obtainable relatively easily for communication studies in such areas as scientific research, medicine, business, law, and military affairs.
HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2017
Institutional genres often form dynamic systems or chains. In this paper we report on a possible ... more Institutional genres often form dynamic systems or chains. In this paper we report on a possible expansion of the genre system that undergirds the appointment process of assistant professors in the U.S. This expansion consists of a “response letter” to a letter of recommendation. We first analyse a small corpus of these response letters by looking at the openings and closings and the bodies of the letters. The larger aim of this analysis is to explore the possible rationales that might underlie the composition, stylistic character and content of these texts.
This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by f... more This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of variation in citation practice in the biology subcorpus. To that end, it explores citation practices from a number of perspectives, including the distribution of integral versus parenthetical citations, the choice of reporting verbs, the effect of citing system, and the occurrence of selected features such as the use of citees’ first names. Results show little difference between the undergraduate and graduate papers, some effect of the citing system, and a somewhat richer intertextuality in the “evolutionary” as opposed to the “molecular” biology papers. Overall, this is an impressive body of student work from the viewpoint of textual variat...
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