Elena Tarasheva, PhD New Bulgarian University

Conclusions at last year’s BETA conference

Method and effect of the previous study 2 corpora: students’ writing – film analysis; 1 st & 2 nd draft Analysis of the message of Michael Palin’s Travel series about Eastern Europe The first draft corpus revealed features of informal style, lack of cohesive devices through Key words; Concordancing revealed racial language. The second draft showed improvement

Corpora and method for this study Students’ summaries of a text; 300 words long The text for the summary Key words for the summaries are compared to the key words for the text Concordancing reveals how each key word is used for the summaries and in the original Word lists suggest common mistakes in the writing

The corpora 13 student summaries 1 st year students at Sofia University Language proficiency – C1 Taught about cohesion, coherence, linking devices, text flow 4 hours of teaching per week The summary was set as a homework. The work was submitted via the electronic platform Moodle

statistics tokens (running words) in text2,667 types (distinct words)729 type/token ratio (TTR)27.33 standardised TTR basis1,000 mean word length (in characters)4.99 sentences2,792 mean (in words)18.99 paragraphs377 mean (in words)100.93

Key words Calculated via a statistical procedure An automatic function of The Word Smith Compares the frequency list of a task corpus to the frequency list of a balanced corpus – in this case: the British National Corpus The words with a frequency higher than in the balanced corpus tend to show the ‘about-ness’ of a text, specific language idiosyncrasies, particulars of the style etc. The words with a frequency lower than in the balanced corpus show what the author avoided

Key words in the original Key words in the summaries Rhetoric We Writing Radical Writer Toward Our Conservative Student Composition Honest Coherence Learns Rhetoric Writing Conservative Writer Radical Liberal Coherence Text Composition Examples Author Doesn s

Concordancing All the cases when a word is used in the corpus The word is highlighted The context to the left and right is shown The concordances can be arranged to criteria pre-set by the researcher – L or R, -2, +3 etc.

The degree of formality

The possessive ‘s

The Use of linking devices

Linking devices

Clusters Automatically calculated by the Word Smith Words which occur together The number of words can be pre-set – 3, for this study, but it can be 4, 5, 6

Major key words in context Original collocates Summary collocates

A missing key word

concordancing In this case – arranged according to -L1 Because the word is a noun and we are interested in the attributes used with it If it was a verb and we wanted to see what objects follow, then we would arrange for +R1

students

original

Relative clauses

Language Functions

Language functions

Negative keyness original summary

Conclusions Comparing the key word lists of a text and its summary reveal whether the gist of the text has been grasped Concordances show differences in focus, suggests possible misunderstandings Word lists allow assessing the acquisition of grammatical features, such as relative clauses, linking words etc. High key-ness can reveal language functions Word lists also reveal adherence to a style