2. Exploring Formulaicity for First Year Composition Students Robin Sulkosky

3. Presentation Impetus Quantitative Analysis & Corpus Linguistics in First Year Composition Exploratory Study – Methods – Results – Interpretation Discussion/ Action items

4. Impetus to study formulaicity Formulaic language defined Formulaicity and register – Assumption: Formulae and register are linked Idiosyncrasies in ELL writing & of FYC students (Bartholomae 1999)

5. Impetus to Study Formulaicity Parallels in student-writers appropriating a different language Wealth of research identifying formulaicity and how it can be used for L2 student-writers – “Frequency and Use of Lexical Bundles in Conversation and Academic Prose” Conrad & Biber – “Lexical Bundles in Published and Student Disciplinary Writing” Cortes – Formulaic Language in L1 and L2 Expert Academic Writing” Perez –Lantada But what about FYC writers?

6. Quantitative Research in FYC pedagogy Richard Haswell’s “Quantative Methods in Composition Studies: An Introduction to their Functionality” – In response to WPAs requesting hard (numerical) data for various inquiries on a listserv, Haswell says: “These and most of the other data hoped for are nonexistent or scanty at best. No doubt, lack of hard data is part of the reason the WPAs were posting their queries in the first place. It seems the need for quantitative research in the composition field is a crisis in itself.”

7. Corpus Linguistics in FYC pedagogy My own search for data Corpus linguistics—for Specific/ Academic purposes only?

8. EAP/ ESP Questions about L1 Formulaicity Is formulaicity in academic genres a native skill? (Perez-Llantada 2014) Can FYC students benefit from explicit instruction of academic formulas? (Cortes 2004)

9. Narrowing questions for my exploratory study What kinds of formulaistic errors do FYC students typically make? How can approaching instruction by way of formulaicity enhance writing pedagogy for FYC? How can studies with corpus linguistics enhance writing pedagogy for FYC?

10. Study Methods 1.Choosing a comparative corpus 2.Collect academic formulas 3.Using concordance software, derive an academic formulas list from academic register of COCA corpus – See Handout 1 4.Collect student writing 5.Cross-reference academic formula frequency in COCA with student writing corpus – See Handout 2

11. Drawbacks/ Limitations Can’t cull quotations from student writing (or can we?) – When manually checked, some student formula usage was quoted from scholarly authorities – But the COCA academic corpus likely has this same phenomenon Circuitous collection of formula list from COCA Reasonable PM cut-off point? Student corpus comparatively small

12. Results See Handout 3

13. Results & Discourse Functions Stance Functions (from Conrad & Biber 2004) – epistemic/ attitudinal stances Discourse organizers (from Conrad & Biber 2004) – reflect relationships between prior and coming discourse Referential Expressions (from Conrad & Biber 2004) – Formulae in “specification of attributes” category of referential expressions bring focus to some particular attribute of the entity

14. Interpretations Diagnosing overuse and underuse Stance expressions overused: students too certain on complex topics? – Needs to be; Are able to; The fact that Discourse organizers mixed: students lack range of organizing expressions? – On the one hand; On the other hand Referential expressions underused: Failure to qualify, quantify, explore, address, or otherwise analyze some part or quality of an entity in question? – In the absence of; The nature of

15. Next Steps Gather more student papers Run log-likelihood test on discourse function categories between COCA and student corpora to bolster claims of underuse/ overuse Streamline the whole process

16. Discussion/ Action Items Learning discourse function frames with They Say, I Say – Uses intermediate forms with exchangeable content words – Assessing student success with particular discourse functions found in TSIS with studies like this one? Are there studies of this type to study student mastery of academic register for FYC students? Is this a suitable method of inquiry to enhance pedagogical theory in writing? Practice?