36.1233, Reviews: Variation in University Student Writing: Craig (2025)

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Subject: 36.1233, Reviews: Variation in University Student Writing: Craig (2025)

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Date: 11-Apr-2025
From: Elizabeth (Betsy) Craig [eccraig at uga.edu]
Subject: Corpus Linguistics; Variations in University Student Writing: Craig (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2449

Title: Variation in University Student Writing
Subtitle: A communicative text type approach
Series Title: Studies in Corpus Linguistics   117
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: John Benjamins
           http://www.benjamins.com/
Book URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.117

Author(s): Larissa Goulart

Reviewer: Elizabeth (Betsy) Craig

SUMMARY
Goulart begins by justifying her study of university student writing
with the significance of written expression in academia, which is why
most liberal arts institutions include a two-course sequence in
first-year writing as a prerequisite in the core curriculum. The
corpus under examination here consists of over 900 assignments from
undergraduates taking courses beyond the first year in the humanities
and in both the physical and social sciences.
While first-year and L2 writing studies (Aull, 2015; Craig, 2008; Leki
& Carson, 1997) focus on how freshman writing courses could be
improved upon in preparation for the higher-level, critical thinking
demands of discipline-specific, writing-intensive courses, Goulart
hopes to emphasize the importance of considering both discipline and
purpose when analyzing the text and linguistic profiles of academic
writing. She notes a confluence of linguistic features dependent on
both communicative purpose (the reason for writing) and discipline,
delineating four: arts and humanities, social sciences, physical
sciences, and life sciences. For example, Goulart cites a previous,
inspirational study having found that “[a]rgumentative writing is more
phrasal in composition classes…, but more clausal in arts and
humanities” (Staples & Reppen, 2016) and points to the need for more
in-depth considerations of discipline and register variation in
studies of academic writing at higher levels (p. 10).
Chapter 1, the introduction, provides an exhaustive summary of prior
multidimensional (MD) analyses of the linguistic features of
university writing as investigated by various researchers, most
originating from Northern Arizona University under the auspices of
Douglas Biber; indeed, a primer on MD analysis may be warranted here
(See Biber references below). As detailed by him and his minions since
1988, academic writing represents a distinctive register with certain
linguistic features: more lexically formal, nominally dense, and
grammatically complex than spoken varieties of English. What is new
here is Goulart’s use of the term ‘register’ in a more nuanced way,
specifically to refer to different writing assignment types/purposes:
argument, description, recounting of a process, explanation,
comparison/contrast, narration, advice, and proposition.
Chapter 2/Methodology describes the compilation of the corpus under
study from three pre-existing corpora (ETS, BrAWE, & BAWE), ultimately
consisting of 960 texts from third-year, L1 and L2 students at British
universities. The Biber Tagger was used for part-of-speech annotation,
and Python scripts were written to identify lexico-grammatical
patterns. The remainder of the chapter outlines the steps taken in
this study to include identifying complexity features and computing
and norming their rates of occurrence.
Chapter 3 surveys studies of register categories in university writing
and delves into the difficulty of the nomenclature, which is
complicated by the myriad of ways that registers are defined (or not)
by researchers, writing instructors, and students themselves. Goulart
uses the term ‘register’ to refer to assignment type and proposes the
phrase “communicative text types” (CTTs) to categorize written
assignments by purpose for writing. Two generalizations gleaned from
this survey find that, while academic essays occur in all disciplines,
argumentative essays are more frequent in the humanities and
informative essays more in the hard sciences. She mentions two case
studies to clarify assignment types (registers), one of which simply
asked writing instructors and found not a lot of uniformity in their
designations for ‘university writing,’ especially in that “texts from
the same register might have different communicative purposes”
(p. 59), and a single text may have multiple communicative purposes.
Goulart puts forth her ‘bottom-up’ approach as a way to describe texts
objectively before categorizing them in order to account for
variations in communicative purpose within the same register.
Because of the lack of consistent, overt markers for register
categories as discussed previously, Chapter 4 develops the framework
for each text in the three corpora under study here to be classified
by its major communicative purpose among the following eight: to give
a procedural account, to argue, to explain/analyze, to advise, to
compare, to narrate, to describe, or to propose or express
possibility, with the first three being the most common found and
accounting for more than 70% of all the texts. Certain major CTTs were
found to be more frequent within broad discipline areas: procedural
recounts in the life and physical sciences, arguments in the
humanities and social sciences, proposals in the social and physical
sciences, and comparisons in the arts and humanities. Unsurprisingly,
explanation occurred as the most frequent minor communicative text
type across all disciplines, and Goulart thus deems exposition a
“foundational purpose in university writing” (p. 91).
Chapter 5 describes the textual (non-linguistic) features of
university CTTs, and these situational characteristics are applied
individually to each text in the corpus. In other words, each text was
annotated for length (by word count), text layout (summaries,
headings, citations), visual elements (figures/tables), and
explicitness of purpose. A major finding shows texts in the hard
sciences to be generally shorter than those in the arts and
humanities, unless the purpose is to compare or to propose.
In Chapter 6, Goulart expresses the need for a new MD analysis of
university writing in order to consider more variables along with a
new factor analysis. She presents a review of Biber’s (1988) seminal
work in register studies, which first provided “a way to statistically
identify linguistic features that tend to co-occur in a group of
texts” (p. 11) and which focused on key distinctions between speech
and writing. Goulart applies three of Biber’s five original continuum
dimensions (involved vs. informational production, narrative vs.
non-narrative concerns, explicit vs. situation-dependent reference,
overt expression of persuasion vs. its absence, and abstract vs.
non-abstract information) to her corpus analysis but takes them
further to distinguish academic writing assignments more finely by
CTT. (Note Biber’s discipline distinctions were more specific, such as
mathematics, law, medicine, education, etc.) Thirty-eight
lexico-grammatical features are isolated for factor analysis using the
Biber Tagger and several other software programs. After tagging the
corpus, checking for accuracy, correcting the tags, and writing
scripts for grammatical complexity features, MD analysis culminates
with an elucidation of the correlations among variables in a
functional interpretation, a linguistic analysis in relation to
communicative purpose, and the text layout characteristics of various
samples of university writing. Goulart compares in detail her factors
along the dimensions of involved/informational,
narrative/non-narrative, and explicit/situation-dependent reference
across general disciplines, maintaining considerations of the varied
textual and linguistic profiles of each CTT. Separating these
dimensions points to the importance of discipline considerations and
to the significance of a CTT analysis: proposition and procedure
description convey possibility, while comparison, explanation, and
argument tend more towards descriptive prose.
Chapter 7 revolves around the elusive definition of the academic essay
and begins with a summary of MD analysis for the essay register.
Goulart reviews Biber’s Dimensions 1-3 (elaborate/condensed,
production of possibility/content-focused description,
informational/involved); in addition, she adds to her analysis the
variables of CTT and text-linguistic characteristics. Goulart contends
that a CTT approach complements a register description of the academic
essay genre. Essays, as one of the most common university assignments
among all disciplines, remain elusive to a concise definition, and she
seeks to characterize them not only by linguistic and textual
characteristics, but also by communicative purpose (CTT); she further
wants to account for what an essay is explicitly within distinct
disciplines. She summarizes by first identifying the combinations of
purpose in the essay register by discipline and then delineates the
textual characteristics of the register for each of the four
disciplines in the study: arts and humanities, social sciences,
physical sciences, and life sciences. Argument and explanation are
found to be the most common major CTT, accounting for almost 75% of
the essays in the corpora, followed by comparison and proposition at
13.4% and 6.9%, respectively (p. 157). Five percent of the texts
account for the remaining 4 CTTs. Explanation is found to be the most
common CTT when considering both major and minor essay purposes. This
section then goes on to delineate minor essay purposes by discipline.
With regard to situational characteristics, academic essays in this
study have in common that they are all planned and written by
undergraduates for an instructor audience; the textual characteristics
display more variation in length, layout, and visual elements. As for
linguistic features, disciplines differ widely, revealing that the
subject area has a greater influence on grammatical structure than on
CTT.
Chapter 8 presents some generalizations that can be derived from the
results of the study.
Goulart’s methodological contribution gives us a review of CTT in
essays across university disciplines, where she posits register and
CTT analysis in opposition to each other. In the end, Goulart suggests
implications for teaching, future research, and register studies in
university writing. She concludes that “learning the linguistic
characteristics of CTTs can help students write different registers”
(p. 205).
EVALUATION
The crux of this text is to discern and apply finer distinctions
within the register of academic essays with regard to writing purpose
and discipline. However, Goulart seems to distinguish her approach as
proffering a CTT analysis in opposition to previous register studies.
But I see the two as differing levels of distinction: while the term
‘register’ is traditionally used to refer to the level of language use
(written vs. spoken, formal vs. informal, rural vs. urban, etc.), CTT
goes deeper into the singular register of academic essay writing to
ascertain purpose because “...the register of essays cannot be
characterized by a single communicative purpose” (Goulart, 2024, p.
199). Illuminating connections among discipline and writing purpose is
the greatest contribution of this work to the field, but I do not feel
the need for a new term: “communicative text type.”
As an EFL instructor myself, I am always curious about the biography
of the authors I read. As it turns out, Goulart is a non-native
speaker of English herself, and this is immediately apparent when on
page 7, she uses the phrase “the need of…” where she intends the
highly idiomatic “the need for...” In my own doctoral dissertation
(Craig, 2008), I identify such structures (with errant preposition
selection in L2 N+P clusters) as particularly identifying of
advanced-level L2 productions. Perhaps, this explains some fallacies
in her structural analyses.
Such grammar errors are inevitable in a manuscript of any length, even
for L1 speakers, but not in the essential analysis being conducted
therein. My issue arose early in the text with her analysis of passive
voice structures in English (BE + V-ed). In her very first example of
a passage from the corpus, she deems a past participle (in the passive
voice) a past tense verb, when in fact the copula, marked as present,
carries the tense. There is no indication that essays were screened
for those written by native vs. non-native speakers. Could this be a
tagger problem? Corpus analysis is tedious work with regard to the
utilization of accurate tagging and concordancer software
applications. Appendix A addresses the questionable reliability of the
Biber Tagger with L1 and L2 corpora, and Appendix B supplies a
tag-fixing script. I have found much clarity using the CLAWS Tagger,
which is less error prone, and ANTCONC concordancer software with an
attractive user interface for structural analyses.
Hence, I take some issue with the grammatical analysis of some of the
passages: within the first few pages of her introduction, Goulart
presents a sample (p. 6) of how she intends to analyze and contrast
two written passages to make a point about separate disciplines, but
this example includes a structural analysis error in the very point
she is basing her analysis on: past tense vs. passive voice verbs. She
refers to the form “I am inclined” as a past tense verb, ignoring the
fact that tense is always (except in the case of modals) marked on the
first word in the verb phrase in English and mislabeling the past
participle as a past tense verb here. And she completely ignores the
fact that 4 out of 5 of the passive voice verbs she is referring to in
the other contrasting passage are all in the past tense; hence, tense
is not an essential distinction in the two passages. This misstep sets
me to wonder from the get-go as to the accuracy of the structural
analyses herein. Indeed, she labels a participial adjective and a
gerund (both bolded) as “verbs of activity” on p. 127 in her
discussion of discourse compression features in descriptions of
procedures, which is the bulk of the text here (Chapter 6). On p. 137,
she highlights existential BE as a factor, where in fact the copula is
used here in service to a past participle in the passive voice.
Furthermore, it was quite cumbersome as a reader to adapt to a new
mark-up system for each excerpt analyzed in the study. There are so
many grammatical features being highlighted, but I would appreciate a
singular key with each structure designated in a uniform way
throughout the text excerpts, such as all prepositions are in bold
rather than finding them demarcated one way in one excerpt and another
way in the next. As is, the notations had to be provided anew in the
prose for each excerpt.
Goulart has demonstrated that not only is vocabulary
discipline-specific, but also grammatical structure varies with
academic field. With regard to the CTTs, I found few of the
conclusions to be counter-intuitive because they come to reason given
the varying subject matter of different fields of study: of course,
argumentative writing entails much explanation as a minor (or
secondary) purpose and tends to be longer in the humanities, whereas
the physical sciences display more objective descriptions and
procedural accounts than other disciplines. Explanation is the most
common CTT across all disciplines and text types; indeed, the
definition of ‘essay’ from the French verb is ‘to try.’ She is careful
to point out that some differences do not fall along the ‘hard’ vs.
‘soft’ sciences, such as the inclusion of in-text citations in
procedural accounts within both the physical sciences and the arts and
humanities. The social and life sciences tend to use such citations
for proposition papers. Unfortunately, little is revealed here that is
counter-intuitive with regard to distinctions among disciplines: of
course, discipline has an influence on linguistic features, and
regarding textual features, arts and humanities and the social
sciences display general differences distinct from the physical and
life sciences. It appears discipline affects structural linguistic
features rather more than CTT.
There is an extensive use of figures (36), appendices (8), and tables
(58) for clarity, averaging seven per chapter; however, there may be
too many tables with repeated information that simply consist of
rearranging the categories of columns and rows. Chapter 8 includes
very useful summary tables of the findings. I did find the tables more
conducive to comprehension than when reading through the same
information in prose form as provided in the minutiae of Chapter 7,
which proved to be a most tedious read. I believe this points to the
convoluted nature of introducing a multitude of additional factors in
an MD analysis, in which the conclusions multiply exponentially with
each new factor.
The use of highly specialized jargon indicates the need for a glossary
because a core issue in any linguistics research is the definition of
terms. The addition of a glossary would have been a useful reference
(even for someone who is well-versed in both corpus linguistics and
academic writing analysis) in order to maintain
distinctions/similarities among the terminology used in this and past
studies. As it is, I found myself needing to repeatedly reference such
terms as discourse domain/register/genre/discipline, communicative
text type/task/assignment type/writing purpose, essay/paper, etc.
Implications for pedagogy were paltry compared to other works focusing
on corpus linguistics analysis of academic writing (Aull, 2015; Craig,
2008; Staples & Reppen, 2016). Otherwise, I find it difficult to
discern a usefulness for this analysis other than to say essays in
different disciplines contrast in their linguistic, textual, and
semantic properties. The variationists paradigm emphasizes differences
among variables, but I find most interesting the generalizations
regarding similarities among CTTs that can be drawn here. For example,
in Chapter 6, texts from arts and humanities are found to have more
lexico-grammatical features of elaborated discourse (Dimension 1:
complement clauses, verbs of communication, stance adverbs) than all
other disciplines, whereas CTT displays greater effects on the
lexico-grammatical features in Dimension 2 (possibility vs.
description). Again, some familiarity with MD analysis is required
here. I felt almost no contribution to how this study might inform
tertiary writing pedagogy as other corpus studies of the register
have.
The key methodological contributions here consist in 1) distinguishing
CTT classifications (what I would call writing purpose); 2) examining
variation across both CTT and discipline; and 3) describing the
textual (not only linguistic) characteristics of different writing
assignments. However, I find little revealed that is counter-intuitive
with regard to distinctions among disciplines: of course, discipline
has an influence on linguistic features, and with regard to textual
features, arts and humanities and the social sciences display general
similarities with each other and differences from the physical and
life sciences. It seems discipline affects structural linguistic
features rather more than CTT. Goulart perhaps overextends the
significance of her findings but points to the need for instructors in
various disciplines to make explicit for their students the purpose
for their writing assignments. Other studies (Aull, 2015; Craig, 2008;
Staples & Reppen, 2016) have proven more useful to me as an L2 writing
instructor in their demonstrations of how “macro-level writing
constructs” (Aull, 2015, p. 8) such as argument, ethos, and voice are
manifested by structural features. Thus, I advocate for a
lexico-grammatical approach to writing instruction for non-native
speakers striving to emulate the sophistication of L1 discourse in the
genre. The variationist paradigm is valuable for purely descriptive
information on minute distinctions that can be attributed to a
multitude of factors.
REFERENCES
Aull, L. (2015). First-year university writing: A corpus-based study
with implications for
pedagogy. Springer.
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge
University Press.
Biber, D. (1994). An analytical framework for register studies. In D.
Biber & E. Finnegan (Eds.),
        Sociolinguistic perspectives on register (pp. 31-56). Oxford
University Press.
Biber, D. (2006). University language: A corpus-based study of spoken
and written registers.
John Benjamins.
Biber, D. (2019). Text-linguistic approaches to register variation.
Register Studies, 1(1), 42-75.
Biber, D. & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, genre, and style (2nd ed.).
Cambridge University Press.
Craig, E. (2008). N+P Clusters in Freshman Composition: A
lexico-grammatical approach to
academic vocabulary for second language writers. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation.
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/craig_elizabeth_c_200812_phd.pdf
Leki, I. & Carson, J. (1997). Completely Different Worlds: EAP and the
writing experiences of
ESL students in university courses. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 39-69.
Staples, S., & Reppen, R. (2016). Understanding first-year L2 writing:
A lexico-grammatical
analysis across L1s, genres, and language ratings. Journal of Second
Language
Writing, 32, 17-35.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Elizabeth (Betsy) Craig is a freelance editor specializing in EAP
writing and corpus analysis of the genre. She taught first-year
writing, English grammar, and applied linguistics at The University of
Georgia and EAP in intensive English programs and language teacher
training institutions abroad; her research focused on descriptive
lexicogrammar in an effort to address persistent, learner-identifying
errors with regard to function words in advanced L2 English writing.



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