An integrated corpus and genre analysis approach to writing research and pedagogy: Development of graduate student genre knowledge
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Casal, Joseph
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 28, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Xiaofei Lu, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Xiaofei Lu, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen E Johnson, Committee Member
Celeste S Kinginger, Committee Member
Matthew Edward Poehner, Outside Member
Robert William Schrauf, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Applied Linguistics
Corpus Linguistics
Second Language Writing
Sociocultural Theory
Content-Based Instruction - Abstract:
- Research on domain specific genre-practices and related genre-based pedagogies have increasingly integrated corpus-based approaches to linguistic form with rhetorical approaches to writers’ functional aims. This study draws together these closely related lines of research to bridge genre-based writing research with genre-based writing pedagogy. Informed by the English for Specific/Academic Purposes tradition of Genre Theory and a Sociocultural Theory orientation to human cognition and development, the study consists of two interdependent phases: a corpus-based genre analysis phase and a corpus and genre analysis-based pedagogical intervention phase. In the first phase, a set of formal linguistic features (reporting verbs, shell nouns, phrase-frames, and select measures of syntactically complex structures) are analyzed across the rhetorical stages of 400 published research article introductions from two social science disciplines and two engineering disciplines. The texts are manually annotated for rhetorical moves, and the analysis of linguistic features is conducted with a series of manual processes, custom scripts, and automated corpus tools, and the distribution of formal features across rhetorical stages is analyzed and presented through a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. These analyses are directed towards the second phase, in which a Concept-Based pedagogical intervention is carried out in two sections of a doctoral academic writing course for second language writers that integrates genre and corpus analysis as two integrated class activities. The impacts of this pedagogical approach on the developing genre knowledge of graduate student participants is analyzed through a Vygotskian genetic approach to development, and learner perceptions are also reported.