the third lancaster university postgraduate … issues in critical discourse analysis: a discussion...

The Third Lancaster University

Postgraduate Conference

in Linguistics and Language Teaching

3 July 2008

Sponsored by

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/laelpgconference/index.htm

2 Department of Linguistics Department of Linguistics Department of Linguistics Department of Linguistics

and English Languageand English Languageand English Languageand English Language

The Third Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching - 3 July 2008

09:00-09:30 Conference Registration Management School, Hub Area

09:30-10:00 Moderator - Wesam Ibrahim

Opening speech

Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University) Management School, Lecture Theatre 3

10:00-11:00 Moderator - John Heywood

Plenary Session 1

Using WMatrix to Analyse Character in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal

Mick Short (Lancaster University) Management School, Lecture Theatre 3

11:00-11:30 Coffee Management School, Hub Area

Conference Programme




Session 1

Language Studies Lecture Theatre 3

Moderator - Ghada Mohamed

The Uses and History of BE going

to + Infinitive in English

Steve Disney

(Lancaster University)

Corpus-Based Study of Gender

Representation: A Case of

Malaysian School Children’s

Writing

Sheena Kaur


Working Memory &

Chinese Learners’ Processing of

Complex English Sentences

Marvin Ren


Session 2

Critical Discourse Analysis Lecture Theatre 5

Moderator - Ruth Gregson

Constructing the ‘Golden Triangle’:

A CDA Approach to the Study of the

Linguistic Landscape

Kate Torkington


Constructing National Identity in a

Phone-In Radio Broadcast: Elite

Discursive Strategies vs. Lay

Participant

Filipa Ribeiro


Laughter and Laughables:

An analysis of departures from

the business agenda in call centre

interaction

Dawn Matthews

(University of Huddersfield)

Session 3

Language Teaching & Literacy Lecture Theatre 6

Moderator - Kathy Lee

The Washback Effect of the

Specialised English Test (SPE)

on Learning

MM Abasabadi


Using Verbal Protocols to Gain

Insight into How Examiners

Interpret Writing Scale Descriptors

Prior to any Rater Training

Charalambos Kollias


The eye cannot see itself seeing:

Understanding adolescent literacy

from young people’s membership

categories

Lynde Tan


Session 4

Corpus Linguistics Lecture Theatre 8

Moderator - Costas Gabrielatos

Investigating Lexical Bundles in

NS and NNS Writing

Yu-Hua Chen


20th Century Changes in Modal

Verb Frequencies

Neil Millar


Muslim Women and the Voice of

the BBC: Insights from Corpus

Linguistics and Critical Discourse

Analysis

Bandar Al-Hejin


13:00-14:00 Conference Lunch and Poster Session Management School, Hub Area

11:30-13:00 - Parallel Sessions




Session 5

Cognitive Linguistics Lecture Theatre 3

Moderator - Alexandra Polyzou

Parts of Speech and

Prototype Theory: Category

Overlap in Salish Language

Lindsay Weichel

(University of Oxford)

Buy:Sell and Chase:Flee –

Converses on the Continuum

of Antonym Canonicity

Sandra Kotzor

(University of Oxford)

Iranian Taleshi:

Graded Grammatical Change

Daniel Paul

(University of Manchester)

Session 6

Phonology Lecture Theatre 5

Moderator - Mazura Muhammad

Prosodic (Non-) Marking of

Repair in Arabic

Spontaneous Speech

Nora Zahrani

(University of York)

Investigating the Influence of

Local Accent on the Pronunciation

of Non-native English Speakers in

Manchester

Rob Drummond


Voicing Patterns of Plosives in

Standard Modern Greek

Spoken by Greek Cypriots:

Production & Perception

Katarzyna Alexander


Session 7

Stylistics Lecture Theatre 6

Moderator - Bernhard Forchtner

Killer Sharks in a Sea of Custard!’

– Imagery Realities with

Real World Effects

Thomas T. Ristimaki

(University of Wales)

Thought Presentation in Simplified

Readers: the Consequences of

Simplification and Implications

for Text Comprehensibility

Shuchen Chang


Stylistic Study of Film:

(Im)Politeness in

the Joy Luck Club (1993)

Rong Rong


Session 8

Language Teaching Lecture Theatre 8

Moderator - Sheena Kaur

China’s Linguistic Landscape:

The Case of Wuzhou and

Guangzhou

Li Yi


Intensifiers and

Grammaticalization:

Evidence from one Intensifier 'chao'

in Mandarin Chinese

Chien-hui Lu

(Nat. Taiwan Normal University)

Ideological Collocation in Meta-,

Wahhabi Discourse: A Comparative

Corpus-Based Study

Amir Salama


15:30-16:00 Coffee and Poster Session Management School, Hub Area






Session 9

Critical Discourse Analysis Lecture Theatre 3

Moderator - Alexandra Polyzou

Language about a Language: A Discursive Approach to

a Minority Language

JW Unger


Jürgen Habermas’ Language Philosophy and the Dis-

course-Historical Approach

Bernhard Forchtner


Methodology Issues in Critical Discourse Analysis:

A Discussion of Genre

Eleanor Lamb


Session 10

Language Teaching and Literacy Lecture Theatre 5

Moderator - Mahmood Abasabadi

Teachers Talking about Language: A New Approach

to Professional Development for Classroom

Teachers in Irish Primary Schools

Matthew Wallen

(University of Limerick)

An Exploration of Language Learning Strategy Use

Among Egyptian EFL Teacher Trainees

Magdy El Sayed El-Khabaty


Task-Based Language Teaching and Assessment

Fatima Tanveer Ameen

(University of West of

England-Bristol)

Session 11

Cognitive Linguistics Lecture Theatre 6

Moderator - Michelle Rong

The Acquisition of English Tense and Copula be by

L1 Chinese Learners

Fu-Tsai Hsieh

(University of York)

Latinised Arabic and Connections

to Bilingual Ability

Mariam Aboelezz


Categories Revealed by English Classifier-like

Words: A Case Study of ‘Sheet/Sheet of’

Xu Zhang


Poster Presentations (continued overleaf)

Abdul Fatah Omar

(Newcastle University)

An Automatic Text Classification of the Electronic

Corpus of Wilkie Collins: The Problem of High Dimen-

sional Data

Carol Bellard

(University of Huddersfield)

Joining the Stylistics Discourse Community: An Em-

pirical Study of Student Development in Learning

Stylistics

Kathy Ka Man Lee


Code Switching in Hong Kong Tertiary Science

Classroom




17:35-18:35 Moderator - Steve Disney

Plenary Session 2

The Problem of Getting Real in Applied Linguistics: The Case of Tasks in

Language Pedagogy

Martin Bygate (Lancaster University) Management School, Lecture Theatre 3

18:35 Closing Remarks

19:30 Dinner Bamboo Garden Restaurant - Lancaster town centre

Poster Presentations (continued)

Mike Tiittanen


Pilot study of Simple Past Tense Oral Production by

Mandarin and Tamil ESL learners

Neil Cooke & Lee Gillam

(University of Surrey)

Towards Automatic Collocation Extraction

Sachiyo Nishikawa


The Impact of Two Different Modes of Input on L2

Speech Production of Adult Japanese Learners

Sheryl Prentice


Exploring the Validity of the Web as a Corpus:

Matching Frequency Results for Rare Constructions

from Google UK with the BNC

Simon Kinzley


Chinese Undergraduates Studying Academic

Writing on the Lancaster University EAP and Study

Skills Pre-Sessional Course: Do they do what we tell

them to and does it really help them?




Professor Mick Short

Lancaster University

Using WMatrix to Analyse Character in Harold Pinter's Betrayal

This presentation will discuss the use of the Wmatrix semantic analysis

corpus tool to compare the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. It

will be helpful if participants have read the play and/or watched the

video of the film of the play beforehand.

I will first introduce the Wmatrix tool in general terms and also in-

troduce the play. Then I will show how Wmatrix can be used as

part of an analysis of the main characters in the play and their rela-

tionships. An important point which will emerge is that this corpus

tool, like other such tools, does not give us automatic answers, but

shows us potentially interesting parts of the text to examine in detail,

resulting in a constant ‘Spitzerian’ analytical circle. In spite of the

fact that its analyses are by no means perfect, the Wmatrix output

also suggests possible interpretative avenues to explore in the play.

Professor Martin Bygate

Lancaster University

The Problem of Getting Real in Applied Linguistics:

The case of Tasks in Language Pedagogy

The term ‘applied linguistics’ (AL) is still widely used to refer to

‘research into language teaching’. However, as journals such as Ap-

plied Linguistics (founded in 1980) show, the field has grown in

exciting ways over the last 25 years; now, following Brumfit (2000),

AL is generally defined, more broadly as ‘the theoretical and empirical

study of real world problems in which language has a central role’; and

it now extends into many areas other than language teaching. In

some key ways, though, this definition sets fresh challenges. In this talk

I will first identify one or two potentially important challenges, and

then examine them specifically in relation to research into pedagogi-

cal tasks. In particular I will consider the impact on task research

of the emergence of theoretical paradigms, the impact of canonical re-

search methods, the top-down nature of much task-based research,

and the ways in which paradigm wars (among other things) can

distract from the primary concern of focusing on real world problems.

In this I will suggest that language education is just one example. And

although there may be some good reasons for these phenomena oc-

curring, at least to some extent, I will suggest that the real world

challenge, however difficult, is perhaps one we should be paying more

attention to. But can we? And if we can, what might it take?

Plenary Speakers




Abdul Fatah Omar Newcastle University (poster presentation)

An Automatic Text Classification of the Electronic Corpus of Wilkie Collins:

The Problem of High Dimensional Data Numerous analyses have been proposed in the critical study of the prose fiction of Wilkie Collins based partly on textual content and partly on biographical considerations. These analyses and criticisms have been generated by what will henceforth be referred to as ‘philological method’, that is, by individual researcher’s reading of printed materials and the intuitive abstraction of generalisations from that reading. With the advent of electronic text, however, a large number of literary works, including the works of Collins, have become available, and this electronic format now permits computational data analysis concepts and procedures to be applied to them. The study examines the viability of an empirical approach—Vector Space Model— to a thematic categorization of the prose fiction works of Wilike Collins using exploratory multi-variate methods. To use such analytical technique effectively; however, problems that arise with respect to the abstraction of data from corpora have to be considered. One of the problems that has a fundamental bearing on the validity of the analytical results is what statisticians call the curse of dimensionality. I use the term here to describe the problem caused by the expansion of the number of data points in a vector space required to give reliable analytical results. This is a dual problem indeed. First, it becomes difficult then for any algorithm or Information Retrieval (IR) system to deal with a huge set of variables. Second, with high-dimensional datasets, a Matrix will include many variables, which are not important in the analysis, and it follows that finding meaningful low-dimensional structures within these high-dimensional observations becomes a relatively impossible task. For concreteness of exposition, the discussion is based on an artificially constructed corpus of 69 texts. These are the novels, collection of short novels and individual short stories of Wilkie Collins. Here the paper proposes a tripartite approach to solving the problem of data with high dimensions: the reduction of the variables within the matrix by means of [1] stemming, [2] removal of irrelevant variables, and [3] the selection of the highest variables in terms of variance. Key words: Text Classification (TC), Vector Space Model (VSM) - Exploratory multivari-ate analysis- cluster analysis- dimensionality reduction- stemming

Amir Salama Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Ideological Collocation in Meta-Wahhabi Discourse:

A Comparative Corpus-Based Study

This study attempts two questions. First, how are words primed for collocational use out of an ideological position in meta-Wahhabi discourse? Second, how corpus linguistics could merge with CDA in a context of research? Meta-Wahhabi discourse is discourse about Wahhabism as a product of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (the 18th century Muslim scholar) who called for the revival of Sunni Islam as the right version Islam. I have built a corpus of two textbooks on Wahhabism which are written from two different stances. The first book The two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror (116,624 words) by S. Schwartz is anti-Wahhabi, while the second Wahhabi Islam: From Re-vival and Reform to Global Jihad (137,626) by N. DeLong-Bas is pro-Wahhabi. My main goal is to compare how each book uses collocations around salient node-words (e.g. WAHHABI, ISLAM, JIHAD, etc.) differently in order to reflect different ideological positions relating to Wahhabism. The research adopts a blend of quantitative corpus-based approach and CDA qualitative one (descriptive & socio-cognitive). The methodology of research goes as follows: first, identifying the significant collocations in each text by testing the MI scores, using WordSmith 4 (Scott 1999) as a corpus-linguistic tool; second detecting the micro-level text analysis of these collocations in terms of the meaning relations holding between the span-word range in collocation (near synonymy, antonymy, etc.), then seeing through the macro-level of interpretation and production of the described collocates, in terms of schemata, scripts and frames. The methodology is estab-lished comparatively between the two texts. Among the final findings are (1) the potential ideological status of collocating items across opposing discourses, (2) pragmatic colloca-tional restrictions, (3) the discursive potential for collocational preferences in pragmatic contexts, and (4) the possibility of merging both corpus linguistics and CDA in a comple-mentary fashion. Key words: Wahhabsim, meta-Wahhabi discourse, CDA, corpus linguistics, ideology, collocation.

Presentation Abstracts (in alphabetical order by first name)




Bandar Al-Hejin Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Muslim Women and the Voice of the BBC:

Insights from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis This presentation discusses the integration of corpus linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore representations of Muslim women in BBC News website texts. There is a pervasive perception among British Muslims today that a substantial amount of negative stereotyping occurs in the Western media’s coverage of the Muslim world (Abbas, 2001: 251; Ahmad, 2006; Ameli et al., 2007), but to what extent are such perceptions justi-fied? Major western news organisations such as the BBC play a key role in constructing and perpetuating discourses surrounding different social groups (van Dijk, 1999: 542). Some interest has developed in critically analysing Western discourses describing Muslims in the media (Macdonald, 2003; Poole, 2002; Richardson, 2004, 2007; Said, 1997), but no studies have analysed texts focusing on Muslim women despite the contentious nature of that topic. Moreover, with the exception of Baker (forthcoming), to this date, no (critical dis-course) studies have been conducted on Muslim-related media texts using corpus-based tools. The first part of this presentation briefly outlines the benefits of combining CL and CDA. I will argue that certain methodologies associated with the two approaches are not only compatible but complementary since major criticisms of each approach can be addressed in their combination (Baker et al., 2008; Hardt-Mautner, 1995; Koller & Mautner, 2004; Maut-ner, 2005). The second part explains some of the challenges and solutions involved in building a specialised corpus of this type, specifically a 2.3 million-word corpus of BBC News website texts from 1997-2007 mentioning Muslim women. In the final part I will report some preliminary findings on the representation of Muslim women in the corpus. Collocation and keyword analyses suggest that the “newsworthiness” of Muslim women in the BBC seems to be associated with what they wear (the veil) as well as contexts of war, conflict and violence. This pattern may contribute to reinforcing stereotypes and elide other (more) important aspects of Muslim women’s lives across the world. Key words: corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, Muslim, women, media

Bernhard Forchtner Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Jürgen Habermas’ Language-philosophy and the Discourse-historical Approach

In recent years critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become an established academic tradi-tion, a quite manifest ‘movement’ (van Dijk). However, beside common goals CDA still lacks theoretical homogeneity. Consequently, the various approaches in CDA have different epistemological underpinnings such as Foucaultian post-structuralism or the Frankfurt School. This paper aims to investigate the latter and its relation to Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach (DHA). Despite basic remarks and brief references, the DHA has not yet deeply discussed its main categories in relation to its theoretical ancestor Jürgen Habermas and his concept of formal pragmatics. The presentation will elaborate this relation with regards to two categories, (a) ‘language in use’ and (b) ‘critique’. The DHA investigates language in use in order to reveal (hidden) structures of domination. Habermas understands language also as a medium of domination; however, through his concept of formal pragmatics with criticisable validity claims (truth, rightness and truthfulness) at its centre, language itself provides critical standards in order to validate discursive prac-tices. An explicit implementation of validity claims would provide a strong justification of the DHA’s critique in order to reject accusations of being ‘subjective’ or ‘biased’. Further-more, Habermas has not only constructed his program with an explicit intention to validate its own critical standards. Rather, his concept of critique, i.e. via notions of pathological commu-nication and failed learning processes seem to be relevant for the DHA’s concepts of socio-diagnostic and prospective critique and their validity. As a result, the paper shows how a close and explicit orientation towards Habermas’ formal pragmatics provides the DHA with clear normative standards in order to provide a justifica-tion of its critique and validate its analysis. Further, Habermas’ language-philosophy could provide the DHA with new concepts regarding a two-dimensional analysis of texts and dis-courses like validity claims, ‘social learning’ or pathological communication which can sup-port its empirical analyses of the continuous discursive self-creation of societies.

Key words: critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach, Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas




Carol Bellard University of Huddersfield

(poster presentation)

Joining the Stylistics Discourse Community: An Empirical Study of Student Development in Learning Stylistics

This paper is a report of work in progress in a PhD project which aims to investigate whether, how and when during their university career students of stylistics acquire an ap-proach to textual analysis that approximates that typically produced by professionals in the stylistics discourse community, entailing a comparison of student work with that provided by several experienced stylistics professionals. The study will provide clearly-defined infor-mation about the work that students produce when they are learning stylistics; whether their approach gradually changes; how it does so, if it does; and will attempt to specify at what point in their studies their written analytical and critical discourse begins to approxi-mate the output of professionals in the stylistics discourse community.

Groups of students in each of their three years of university study will be involved, with a control group for comparison. Student output and the output of several stylistics profes-sionals will be treated as linguistic corpora and analysed using Oxford WordSmith and WMatrix, to give comparisons of semantic and verbal content, and appropriate quantitative data will be analysed using SPSS, so that both quantitative and qualitative outcomes can be evaluated.

Charalambos Kollias Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Using Verbal Protocols to Gain Insight into how Examiners Interpret Writing Scale Descriptors

Prior to any Rater Training.

A methodology that was greatly criticized up and until the early 1980’s was verbal proto-cols. In verbal protocols, subjects are asked to verbalize their thoughts either as they do a task (concurrent verbal reports) or after they have completed a task (retrospective verbal reports). It was not until Ericsson and Simon (1980) re-examined the validity of verbal protocols and proposed objective procedures for collecting and analyzing verbal protocols that this methodology started gaining ground. In the field of testing, researchers (Connor-Linton, 1995, Lumley, 2002; Cumming, Kantor & Powers; Erdosy, 2004) have deemed verbal protocols as a methodology to investigate the reliability of writing performance as-sessment. This paper reports on a small-scale study which investigated written rater perceptions of a new 3-band B1-level English language proficiency writing scale. 3 Raters were asked to produce concurrent verbal protocols on each of the five descriptors of the writing scale and to rate 4 sample essays. The goal of the study was to explore whether or not raters could understand the new writing scales and access sample scripts with them without hav-ing received any prior rater training. The concurrent verbal protocols were recorded and transcribed. An analysis of the verbal

protocols yielded some unexpected results since the new scales had been piloted and pre-

tested with experienced raters. First, the 3 raters experienced difficulties with the wording

of the descriptions. Second, the raters would not always come into agreement on the score

a certain descriptor should receive. The results raise important issues for consideration as

“the background and experience of raters, the nature of the rating scale, and the training of

raters” (Weigle, 2002) can affect the reliability of writing performances. In this presentation,

I will also highlight the importance of gathering data appropriately from verbal protocols.




Chien-Hui Lu National Taiwan Normal University

(oral presentation)

Intensifiers and Grammaticalization: Evidence from one Intensifier ‘chao’ in Mandarin Chinese

Intensifiers have been an intriguing issue in grammaticalization but few studies discuss the relationship between intensifiers and grammaticalization in Mandarin Chinese. The present study aims to investigate the grammaticalization of one emerging intensifier chao in Manda-rin Chinese from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. From diachronic perspective, chao has undergone meaning changes. Wang (1958) classifies Chinese into four periods of time: ancient, middle, pre-modern and modern Chinese. Data in ancient Chinese shows that the word chao has various verbal meanings, such as ‘to leap’, ‘to surpass’, and ‘to exceed’. Most importantly, chao ‘to surpass’ + ji ‘class’, which means that someone can be an official beyond his/her class, influences the latest meaning of chao ji. The concrete meaning ‘to leap’, gradually disappears in middle Chinese and the other verbal meanings of chao such as ‘to surpass’, ‘to exceed’ become more prominent in pre-modern and modern Chinese periods. The phenomenon represents that the verbal mean-ings of chao are more abstract. Chao ji, meaning that someone surpasses his/her class when serving an official officer, lexicalizes into an adjective ‘super’ and modifies nouns like chao ji dian nao ‘supercomputer’ in modern Chinese. According to the synchronic data, chao ji also serves as an intensifier which means ‘extremely, very’. Unlike the adjective use of chao ji modifying something beyond the objec-tive norms, chao ji ‘extremely, very’ remarkably describes speakers’ subject evaluations to-ward the propositions like chao ji gao xing ‘extremely happy’. That is, chao ji ‘extremely, very’ is subjectivized. The last period of semantic change is that the intensifier chao ji, having two phonetic and morphological forms, reduces to a simple form chao. The phenomenon corre-sponds to a principle of economy in grammaticalization (Langacker 1977, Hopper and Traugott 1993). To sum up, the meaning change of chao is illustrated in the following process: chao ‘to sur-pass’ + ji ‘class’ > chao ji ‘super’ (adjective)> chao ji ‘extremely, very’ (adverb) > chao ‘extremely, very’(adverb). Therefore, the finding shows that the relationship between inten-sifiers and grammaticalization is tight. Moreover, chao itself may undergo cliticization or compounding argued by Chui (2000) in the future because of over use in discourse.

Daniel Paul University of Manchester

(oral presentation)

Iranian Taleshi: Graded Grammatical Change To conduct and analyse textual counts in three dialects of Iranian Taleshi, in order to dis-cover indicators of grammatical change amongst a selection of word-order and other fea-tures, and identify and explain varying degrees of change across these dialects. A set of narrative texts were recorded across the dialect area in Iran, using the Pear Story film (Chafe 1980) for elicitation. These texts were transcribed and glossed, and the follow-ing counts conducted:

• percentage of agent clitic placement by constituent;

• percentages of lexical, new and human mentions across argument positions (see Du Bois 1987);

• prepositions v postpositions

• head-initial v head-final AdjPs

• ±finite verbs in progressive constructions These feature counts were analyzed both synchronically (contrasts between the three Taleshi dialects and with Persian) and diachronically (contrasts with older grammatical de-scriptions of these dialects). Preliminary results show significant synchronic variation across each of these features. For example, the Southern dialect positions 49% of clitics on the verb, as against 4% for Cen-tral and Northern dialects when another position is available; and 30% of O-positions con-tain a lexical item (<18% in Northern texts). These figures suggest a grammaticalization of the agent clitic and a desemanticization of the object clitic. Further, in Southern dialects, the high incidence of prepositions, head-initial adjective phrases and +finite verbs in progres-sive constructions all suggest influence from contact with Persian, which is less common further north. Key words: language contact, grammaticalization, language change, clitics




Dawn Matthews University of Huddersfield

(oral presentation)

Laughter and Laughables: An Analysis of Departures from the Business Agenda in Call Centre Interaction

This paper forms part of a larger study on the use of laughter in call centre interaction. Laughter may appear a trivial topic to analyse but as Glenn (2003, p49) suggests ‘virtually any utterance or action could draw laughter under the right or wrong circumstances’ and this is true in Institutional talk. This paper focuses on the occurrence of laughter in this context, exploring the environment in which laughter takes place, what invites the laughter or makes it an appropriate response, and the impact this has on the ongoing sequence in which it is embedded. Using Conversation Analysis (CA) I have analysed 40 hours of data from a gas supply com-pany call-centre and located patterns of laughter in sequences that constitute a move away (even very subtly or briefly) from the main institutionally driven purpose of the call. Drew and Heritage (1992) have argued that distinguishing between institutional talk and ordinary talk is notoriously difficult. However, using Levinson’s ‘activity types’ as a ‘valuable point of departure’ (1992, p21) they propose three factors that contribute towards creating the con-text of institutional talk. My research suggests that both the employee and the customer of the call centre use laughables and laughter as a way of departing from the proto-typical busi-ness call. In this paper, firstly, I discuss the use of laughter and laughables which follow extended gaps in the talk when dealing with delays caused by computer problems. I suggest that the laughables are used to ‘account’ for delays in the business call. Secondly, I demonstrate how the design of the laughables are often assessments / personal comments, how recipients treat these sequences as an environment for adding further laughables and how the se-quences get expanded in further ways, which all constitute a departure from explicitly busi-ness agenda orientated talk. Key words: Conversation Analysis, Laughter, Laughables, Assessments, Business Talk, Call Centre Interaction

Eleanor Lamb Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Methodology Issues in Critical Discourse Analysis: A Discussion of Genre

How does one conduct critical discourse analysis across different genres of texts? Fair-clough (2000: 169) describes different genres as ‘different means of production of a specifi-cally textual sort, different resources for texturing’. Awareness of genre plays a key role in a critical discourse approach to text analysis (see for example Wodak (2000: 192) for a discus-sion of genre and recontextualisation). This paper discusses some of the problems which arise in carrying out a critical discourse analysis which takes into account various genres, through focussing on research currently being conducted into the development of immigration controls in Britain. Drawing largely on the discourse-historical approach, this research examines three ‘spheres’: the political (including speeches and parliamentary debates), that of the media (British newspaper arti-cles and editorials) and that of civil society (pamphlets, posters and reports). The research aims to build up a picture of how the debate over immigration has changed over time, and how this related to the ultimate policy decisions regarding immigration control. This entails examining texts drawn from a relatively large amount of overlapping genres, which throws up various methodological difficulties. Through a comparison of previous cross-genre studies using critical discourse analysis, the paper discusses how these difficulties might be resolved. Key words: critical discourse analysis, genre, immigration control




Fatima Tanveer Ameen University of West of England-Bristol

(oral presentation)

Task-Based Language Teaching and Assessment Task-based learning has become very popular and successful in the ELT field internation-ally. Much has been written about definitions of task and the role of tasks in second lan-guage acquisition (e.g. Ellis 2000; Skehan 1996; Nunan 1989), as well as the different stages in task-based lessons (Willis 1996), and task types (e.g. Skehan and Foster 2000). However, there is little practical discussion of how task-based teaching can be successfully practiced, which levels of oral proficiency are achieved in any given scenario, and how these levels of proficiency can be expressed in the six levels distinguished on the CEF (Common Euro-pean Framework). This research is based on the ongoing discussions on the way the CEF is to be operationalised. Further the research proposes to find out how students evaluate a task-based course and what the implications of such findings are for the teaching practice in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. The key research questions I aim to deal categori-cally are:

• What is Task-Based Learning and Teaching (TBLT)?

• How can task-based lesson be assessed?

• How can the oral skills developed in a task-based approach be mapped on to the six levels of the CEF?

• How can we evaluate students’ perceptions of TBLT? I am piloting the research this semester ( Spring-2008) at University of Sharjah, U.A.E with the Intermediate students ( 18 to 20 years old) of various streams. In my pilot study I have two groups of the same Level called the ‘Traditional Group’ and the ‘Experimental Group’. I am using Task-Based methodology with the experimental group and PPP (Presentation, Practice Production) methodology with the traditional group as I want to find out whether TBLT is more effective than the other existing methods of teaching in the UAE. The ex-ams will be rated by university raters, IELTS raters and CEF raters to find out the answer to the third research question. Finally students will be given questionnaire to find out their perceptions of TBLT.

Filipa Ribeiro Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Constructing National Identity in a Phone-In Radio Broadcast:

Elite Discursive Strategies vs. Lay Participant

Public debate over the ‘idea of Portuguese identity’ within the European context, along with the symbolic and linguistic representation of this idea has taken place during this last decade (Santos, 2004). Much has been written and analysed on Portuguese national identity, but there has never been a discussion over the language in use when referring to the idea of national identity, or an in-depth analysis of the media’s contribution to reshaping discourse(s). This paper proposes to bring together these two facets, and therefore to analyse “The discursive construction of Portuguese national identity in the semi-public (media) discourse”, namely how two apparently competing discourses on national identity (that of the elite and that of laypeople) represent and reframe the country’s national identity. I am interested in how these different types of participants co-construct and negotiate (national) identities (Wodak, 2006) in particular and, in general, how the rhetorical contrast is set between what the prior speaker has said and what the current speaker suggests as an oppositional action (Hutchby, 2001). This study follows in the footsteps of two main research traditions. First, it is situated alongside the literature devoted to the issue of national identity (Anderson, 1991; Gellner, 1983 and Billig, 1995) and secondly, it falls back on the manifold tradition of critical dis-course analysis as a value-loaded science, influenced by social structure and produced in social action (van Dijk, 2001, Fairclough & Wodak 1997). The major concern of this paper is to explore how the discursive practices of participants in an hour-long phone-in radio broadcast programme (whose topic was “is national identity in crisis?”) are constructed along different identity dimensions. Thus, personal, temporal and spatial deictic forms will be explored in order to uncover the participants’ allegiance and non-allegiance to certain groups referred to in the programme. Key words: national identity; critical discourse analysis , semi-public discourse; phone-in radio broadcast programmes




Fu-Tsai Hsieh University of York (oral presentation)

The Acquisition of English Tense and Copula be by L1 Chinese Learners

As is known, Chinese has no tense marking systems at all, whereas English does. Besides, Chinese shi 'be' functions similarly to copula be in English. This paper brings quantitative data to investigate how L1-Chinese-speaking learners of English perform the three types of English morphemes, namely, the third person singular -s, the regular past tense -ed, and the copula be, in their L2 learning. Spontaneous production data was collected from 20 L1-Chinese-speaking school students (age from 11 to 14 years old) by interview and a story telling task. Hypotheses were made in accordance with Prevost and White's (2000) Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis which claims that L2 learners have unaware knowledge of functional categories and features in tense and agreement. It was predicted that the Chinese participants would (i) produce non-finite forms to replace finite forms in the performance of the third person singular -s and the regular past tense -ed, and (ii) perform better in copula be than in verbal inflection (i.e., the 3rd person singular -s and the past tense -ed). The predictions were confirmed by the data. As shown in Table 1 below, the Chinese par-ticipants had 15% of correct use in affixal inflection (i.e., -s and -ed), and 81% of omission over all obligatory contexts. By contrast, there was 84% of correct use in copula be, and 15% of omission. The results not only support the Missing surface Inflection Hypothesis that the omission of verbal inflections is because of the problems with the realization of surface morphology rather than the impairment of the features, but also confirm that L2 learners acquire the forms of be before the inflectional morphology of the in situ thematic verbs. Key words: language acquisition, tense and copula be

JW Unger Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Language about a Language: A Discursive Approach to a Minority Language

There have been a number of recent publications entitled ‘The discursive construction of ...’. While several of these have discussed language as part of e.g. national identity con-struction (e.g. Wodak et al. 1999; Blackledge 2002), few have dealt explicitly with how a minority language itself is talked and written about, and what implications this has both for the language itself and its speakers. Conversely, publications on (minority) language policy, even if they are critical in orientation (e.g May 2001; Phillipson 2003), do not sufficiently account for the way people talk and write about languages, but rather focus on what they say, i.e. the content of texts. In this paper, I discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of using discourse analysis, and more specifically the discourse-historical approach (following e.g. Wodak 2001), to examine the sociolinguistic environment surrounding the Scots language in Scot-land. I will attempt to explain how I used qualitative, context-sensitive analysis of focus group data and written texts to contribute to existing knowledge about Scots, and also to test new methods for the study of language policy. My findings indicate that taking account of the discursive dimension of minority language policy and practices can provide rich detail which is not accessible through purely quantita-tive methods. Furthermore, it can lay bare hitherto concealed or generally accepted power imbalances, thus providing language activists with additional resources. These may help activists to challenge hegemonic structures within which the suppression of a minority language is perpetuated. Key words: discourse-historical approach, discursive construction, language policy, minority language, Scots




Katarzyna Alexander Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Voicing Patterns of Plosives in Standard Modern Greek Spoken by Greek Cypriots:

Production and Perception.

This study describes the way Standard Modern Greek (SMG) plosives are realised by Greek Cypriots. Greek Cypriots, who have Cypriot (a local variety of Greek) as their native lan-guage, are claimed to employ their native realisation of plosives when using (SMG). Since the length of Voice Onset Time (VOT), closure duration and prenasalisation are claimed to make Greek Cypriots’ realisation of SMG plosives distinct, a list of words containing plo-sives and vowels only read by Greek Cypriot subjects was recorded. Additionally, interviews were used to determine how the realisation of /p, t, k, b, d, g/ is perceived by other Greek Cypriots as well as Greeks from Greece. The results of the interviews indicated that both Greek Cypriots and Greeks from the mainland pointed at plosives produced by Greek Cypriots as sounding Cypriot. As the more qualitative data elicited in the interviews did not provide a firm base from which to assert how plosives possibly differ, the data were trian-gulated by means of an acoustic analysis of VOT, prenasalisation and the closure duration of the plosives that had been identified as sounding Cypriot in the interviews. This method-ologically triangulated data suggested that the degree of VOT, prenasalisation and the clo-sure duration might be factors identifying differences between SMG as spoken by Greek Cypriots and Greeks. Key words: perception, plosives, VOT, prenasalisation

Kate Torkington Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Constructing the ‘Golden Triangle’: A CDA Approach to the Study of the Linguistic Landscape

Studies of the linguistic landscape (LL) are concerned with language in its written form, in the public sphere; language that is visible to all through texts such as billboards, place names, commercial shop signs and other public signs (Gorter, 2006). Although the LL constitutes the “very scene (…) where society’s public life takes place” (Ben-Rafael, Sho-hamy, Hasan Amara, & Trumper-Hecht, 2006), it is such a taken-for-granted part of our everyday experience that its importance as a form of social practice is often overlooked. Yet all linguistic tokens, including public signs, are in some way symbolic markers of status and power, operating within semiotic systems of social positioning and power relationships through which struggles for hegemony among social groups can be traced (Scollon & Scol-lon, 2003). Most LL studies to date have relied primarily on quantitative methods, for example count-ing and classifying public signs according to the language(s) used. However, whilst such studies give a useful snapshot of the LL, they fail to unravel the more complex social reali-ties that may be revealed by using CDA methods, such as how the discourses of public signs, like any form of discourse, are both socially conditioned and socially constituitive. In this paper, I focus on how a CDA approach to the LL can be useful to the study of place-identity. Places are not merely constructed physically by people; they are the product of everyday practices, in constant production in a myriad of ways (Cresswell, 2004). The role of language in place-making is fundamental – it is through language (as a social prac-tice) that places are given meaning, and this meaning is maintained, enhanced or trans-formed, and given a moral dimension. Taking the case of the ‘Golden Triangle’, an area of tourist resorts which is gradually becoming a residential area in the Algarve, Portugal, I suggest that the discursive construction of a place through the highly visible texts of the LL may in turn impact upon the discursive construction of individual and social identities of those who inhabit the place. Key words: Linguistic Landscape (LL); Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); place-identity




Kathy Lee Lancaster University (poster presentation)

Code Switching in Hong Kong Tertiary Science Classroom

This study attempts to find out when and why the science teachers code switch in class. At the same time, their attitudes towards it is also explored. Video recording of five lectures of each of the three participants were made followed by individual post-observation inter-views. Thematic coding were then applied to the transcript of the video recording and the interview transcripts. Key words: Science education, code-switching, CIL

Li Yi Lancaster University (oral presentation)

China’s Linguistic Landscape: The Case of Wuzhou and Guangzhou

This paper focuses on the linguistic landscape of two streets in two southern China cities (Wuzhou and Guangzhou) in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Guangdong Prov-ince respectively. The paper analyses the use of the minority language (Zhuang) in Wuzhou, the local language in Guangzhou (Cantonese), the state language (Mandarin Chinese) and English as the international language on public signs. The data include over 1536 pictures of language signs (official and commercial) that were analyzed so as to determine the num-ber of languages used, the languages on the signs and the characteristics of bilingual and multilingual signs in China. The findings indicate that contrary to Cenoz and Gorter’s (2006) findings in Basque and Frisian, as linguistic landscape is related to the official lan-guage policy, the official Zhuang minority language policy in Wuzhou is underrepresented and even neglected by linguistic landscape. There are discrepancies between the simplified/traditional Chinese scripts used on language signs and the language policies regarding the Chinese orthography. The patterns of the spread of English differ between the two cities, for Wuzhou the presence of English is largely authorities-led, whereas for Guangzhou, both authorities-led and citizens-led prevail. Key words: linguistic landscape, Zhuang minority language, Cantonese, English, language equality, multilingualism




Lindsay Weichel University of Oxford (oral presentation)

Parts of Speech and Prototype Theory: Category Overlap in Salish Language

In the Salish language family of North America, there is doubt as to the existence of Lexical Categories, or Parts of Speech, since all lexemes are able to act nominally or verbally in syntax, taking the same inflectional morphology. There is no apparent derivational mor-phology. The following from Straits Salish shows this (Haag 1998):

(1) swiʔqoał_ləʔ_sxw young.man_pst_2s.nom ‘You were a young man.’

(2) ʔiʔenkwəs_ləʔ_sxw brave_pst_2s.nom ‘You were brave.’

(3) t’ləm_ləʔ_sxw sing_pst_2s.nom ‘You sang.’ Drawing data from a variety of sources, this paper compares syntactic and morphological evidence from a number of Salish languages. It concludes that lexical categories exist in Salish languages, since for instance, not all aspect markers are able to attach to all lexemes, and not all lexemes can be possessed. It then applies Prototype Theory to examine the structure of the Salish lexicon, which, it appears, can best be described in terms of overlap-ping categories, with each category and each area of overlap being defined by a central set of prototypical semantic, syntactic, and morphological features. A high degree of gradience appears to exist between categories, with no clear boundary between categories or areas of overlap, indicating that the Parts of Speech, rather than being clearly demarcated syntactic universals, are instead fuzzy categories that bear striking similarities to cognitive semantic categories (Lakoff 1987). Key words: Salish Languages, Lexical Categories, Prototype Theory, Morphology, Syntax, Language Universals

Lynde Tan Lancaster University (oral presentation)

The Eye Cannot See Itself Seeing:

Understanding Adolescent Literacy from Young People’s Membership Categories Understanding of literacy in the field of New Literacy Studies is commonly gained through ethnography. By using ethnography, researchers in this field provide thick description of literacy practices as social practices. These social practices can be “inferred from events mediated by written texts” (Barton & Hamilton, 1998: 14). The ethnographic approach, entailing research methods such as participant observation and interviews, attends to the research participants’ literacy events from “the native’s point of view” (Geertz, 1973). In this presentation, I discuss the problems of providing a “native’s point of view” in my research on adolescent literacy. I argue that even as a participant observer in my adolescent research participants’ school literacy practices, I am always an outsider. Just as the eye can-not see itself seeing, my observation is limited by own perceptual biases and competencies (Francis & Hester, 2004; Pollner & Emerson, 2001). I suggest the use of Membership Cate-gorisation Analysis (MCA) as a complementary method to my ethnographic perspective of studying adolescent school literacy practices. Hester and Eglin (1997) explain that MCA has its origin from the work of Sacks (1992a, 1992b) and MCA “directs attention to the locally used, invoked and organised ‘presumed common-sense knowledge of social structures’ which members are oriented to in the conduct of their everyday affairs” (p.3). Using an interview excerpt as an illustrative example, I explore the potential of using MCA to explicate how my adolescent research participants use their tacit knowledge to design their multimodal production such as a school brochure. In particular, I describe how their commonsense categories “parents” and “adolescents” are used as resources for designing their multimodal production and make connections with the membership work happening during the interview conversations. Key words: adolescent literacy, ethnography, membership categorization analysis, interview conversations




Magdy El Sayed El-Khabaty University of Manchester

(oral presentation)

An Exploration of Language Learning Strategy Use Among Egyptian EFL Teacher Trainees The late 1970s marked the beginning of research into language learning strategies of second language learners. Though a considerable body of research has been carried out in this controversial area, researchers around the world continue to enhance the current, yet criti-cized, rigour of the theoretical framework underpinning this field (Macaro, 2006). The ex-isting body of research is the outcome of studies which was conducted mainly in ESL con-texts using quantitative methodology. Recent research findings indicate the need for studies from EFL contexts. In addition, employing qualitative methodology in investigating lan-guage learning strategies is strongly recommended (Al-Otaibi, 2004). The present study investigates the use of language learning strategies by a group of Egyp-tian EFL learners attending a four-year-teacher training program to qualify as teachers at primary level. It aims at identifying the language learning strategies used by the learners and the particular factors which affect their strategy use. This is an exploratory study utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data is collected from 320 learners (males and females) using the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford, 1990), whereas classroom observation, learner inter-views, and teacher interviews were employed to collect qualitative data from a selected sample of the learners and their language instructors. The quantitative data analysis indicates a major preference of ‘cognitive’ strategies over other type of strategies. The qualitative data analysis indicates that ‘motivation’ and ‘awareness’, among others, are the most influential factors on learners’ strategy use. The study makes theoretical and methodological contributions to the field of language learning strategies. In addition, it has implications pertaining to primary EFL teacher train-ing programs in Egypt. Key words: EFL/Learning Strategies/Teacher Training/Qualitative Research

Mahmood M. Abasabadi Lancaster University (oral presentation)

The Washback Effect of the Specialised English Test (SPE) on Learning

The aim of this study is to explore the “washback effect” (Alderson and wall, 1993) of a high stakes test, the Specialised English Test (SPE), which is used to admit students to universities for BA programmes in English in Iran. A belief commonly held about the SPE Test is that students admitted to university since its introduction in 2002 have been more proficient and successful than pre-2002 students. However the “consequential valid-ity” (Messick, 1996) of the Test has not been explored yet. Therefore, as one step towards exploring the consequential validity, I have decided to look at how students learn for the Test. I examined the learning activities of the students in the two contexts of classroom and out of class to see what they did to prepare for the Test. I also examined the beliefs of the learners by drawing on the SLA literature and the learners’ background variables such as their school fields and language proficiency for their possible interaction with the effect of the SPE Test (Alderson and Wall, 1993). The participants of the study were two contrasting groups- students who were registered to take the SPE Test and students who would not take the SPE Test. I used three instruments to collect the data: questionnaire (from 1000 respondents), preparation advice (from 100 students) and interviews (from 15 students). This paper will present the results from the first two instruments. It will show that the SPE students’ test preparation activities were significantly different from the contrasting group’s activities. It will also show that there were relationships between the students’ test prepara-tion activities and their learning beliefs and their background variables. Finally, this paper will discuss the implications of the findings. Key words: Test, Washback, Consequential validity, Learning




Mariam Aboelezz Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Latinized Arabic and Connections to Bilingual Ability

As software support for non-Latin scripts is becoming more readily available, the continu-ing use of Latinized forms highlights an interesting phenomenon. I focus on Latinized Arabic (LA) as one manifestation of this trend. Today, an online application which con-verts LA to Arabic script exists. At the same time, there is evidence that LA is now being used for more than just online communication. This written form, while still restricted to largely informal domains, appears to be growing in popularity and acceptability. There also appears to be significant variance in the conventions used to Latinize Arabic online in asso-ciation with regional Arabic vernaculars. Thus far, research on LA has dealt with it as a form of script-switching, focusing on the origins, applications and orthographical tendencies of LA. In this essay, I examine LA as a form of code-switching. I study emails from two emailing groups comprising members with varying degrees of bilingual ability in order to investigate links between frequency of LA and bilingual ability. A statistical comparison reveals that members with greater bilingual ability were more likely to use a wider range of scripts and codes, with LA posing as one stylistic option. Email content suggests that factors such as software support, bilingual abil-ity of the user and addressee(s) and possible unintelligibility of LA influence language and script choice. A close examination of code-switching sites based on Gumperz’ (1982) and Poplack’s (1980) criteria reveals that English was frequently used to display formality and authority, while Arabic was reserved for religious, cultural and highly personal content.

Marvin Ren Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Working Memory and Chinese Learners’ Processing of Complex English Sentences

This study sets out to examine the relationship between working memory (WM) and Chi-nese learners’ differences in comprehension of four types of self-embedded complex Eng-lish sentences such as (1) Marry knows the fact that keeping clothes clean is absolutely necessary sur-prises the waiter. Two groups (i.e. fifteen high WM and fifteen low WM) of advanced Chinese learners of English and one control group (i.e. fifteen high WM native English postgradu-ates) attended a self-paced on-line comprehension test. Results showed that high WM na-tive postgraduates had the shortest reading times and the best comprehension scores. High WM Chinese learners needed longer comprehension times and shorter reading times than low WM Chinese learners; and low WM Chinese learners had almost the same comprehen-sion score accuracy as high WM Chinese learners, suggesting that WM had effects on Chi-nese learners’ response times, but not on comprehension accuracy in processing the com-plex English sentences. Key words: second language processing, self-embedded complex sentences, working mem-ory capacity, comprehension accuracy, response times




Matthew Wallen University of Limerick

(oral presentation)

Teachers Talking about Language: A New Approach to Professional Development for Classroom Teachers in Irish Primary Schools

Over the past decade, Ireland has experienced growth in immigration and continues to draw people from all over the world, with a majority coming from EU accession states. Many of these immigrants are children who are learning English as an additional language (EAL). While English language support teachers are allocated to schools, all EAL students are placed in a mainstream classroom regardless of language ability. Therefore, the class teacher has an important role in helping EAL students develop their English skills and succeed in all academic areas. This paper reports on a research project designed to investi-gate effective ways the classroom teacher could meet EAL students’ needs in Irish primary schools. Believing that the research should be “with, by and for” teachers, the most important source of data was the participating teachers’ regular “insider” observations. A collaborative critical inquiry was conducted based on an action research cycle. A mix of both experi-enced and more recently qualified teachers from three publicly-funded schools (representing different religious patronages and a range of EAL student populations) en-gaged in conversation about their perspectives on language learning. Based on these con-versations, these six teacher-researchers developed, implemented, reflected upon and re-ported on interventions intended to support the academic, social and emotional growth of their EAL students. Based on initial findings, the ongoing conversations presented a marked departure from previous professional development experiences that did not provide such an opportunity for dialogue. Much of this dialogue centred on teachers’ understanding of language learn-ing and teaching, providing a rich perspective regarding their own assumptions and experi-ences. Initially, teachers expressed a lack of capacity to address EAL students’ needs, level-ling frustration at a lack of support structures. Gradually, teachers’ began to perceive them-selves as language teachers, and they reported an increased ability to make classroom lan-guage comprehensible for all students, noting that such learning supports have value for both EAL students as well as many of their peers.

Key Words: English as an additional language (EAL), teacher professional development, Ireland, collaborative inquiry, primary education

Mike Tiittanen Lancaster University (poster presentation)

Pilot Study of Simple Past Tense Oral Production by Mandarin and Tamil ESL Learners

My pilot study is on the oral production of the English simple past tense by Mandarin and Tamil L1 ESL learners. I have four hypotheses: 1. The Tamil learners will outperform the Mandarin learners of the same level in their accuracy of

simple past tense oral production (Previous studies have lent support for L1 influence in L2 tense-aspect acquisition. Tamil has a past tense and Mandarin lacks tense alto-gether);

2. Participants in my study will produce irregular verbs correctly more frequently than regular verbs (The ESF project found that irregular verb morphology preceded regular verb mor-phology);

3. Participants will produce telic verbs correctly more often than atelic verbs and will follow the order of accuracy predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (This hypothesis has been supported by numerous studies);

4. Mandarin learners will follow the order of accuracy predicted by the saliency hierarchy (see Bayley’s 1994 study).

My main data elicitation techniques are a film retell task of a short ESL video and interview questions focusing on significant events in the interviewee’s life. I have then coded the verb tokens used in obligatory simple past tense environments during the participants’ oral production in these two tasks for the following: a) correctness; b) verb regularity; and c) lexical aspect. In addition, I also coded the Mandarin participants’ verb tokens for saliency hierarchy category. There is some support for Hypothesis A: every Tamil participant scored higher overall than Mandarin participants of the same oral CEF level. There is evidence in favour of Hypothe-sis B: most of the participants used irregular verbs correctly more often than regular verbs. There is also evidence for Hypothesis C: the vast majority of the participants produced telic verbs more correctly than atelic verbs. There is almost no support for Hypothesis D: none of the Mandarin-speaking participants followed the order of accuracy predicted by the sali-ency hierarchy. Key words – simple past tense, regular verbs, irregular verbs, Aspect Hypothesis, saliency hierarchy




Neil Cooke & Lee Gillam University of Surrey (poster presentation)

Towards Automatic Collocation Extraction

Automatic extraction of valid and valuable collocation patterns from large-scale text cor-pora requires a systematic approach to high frequency grammatical words. These are often simply removed from statistical analysis and collocation results using a pre-selected list of frequent words from a general language corpus. Though simple and surprisingly reliable, the approach does not factor in pragmatic considerations, hence valuable domain-specific keywords may be lost from the analysis, or large quantities of frequent but uninteresting patterns may be generated. We propose and demonstrate an automatic method that can be used reliably to overcome these limitations. Our research domain is context sensitive filtering of emails for purposes of information assurance and brand protection. We demonstrate our approach against the 517,431 emails of the Enron corpus (Klimt and Yang 2004, Keila and Skillcorn, 2005), one of the largest business email collections available for public use. Our analysis uses an institution-specific package of software tools for tasks such as text analysis, ontology learning, and terminology and text management. Our means of identifying cohesion is based on prior work regarding salience. We investi-gate use of “Q”, a simple measure of how tight a narrow pass filter is. We combine “Q” with salience in ranking collocations, resulting in the automatic extraction of valid and valu-able collocation patterns. Key words: collocation, statistical analysis, data cleansing, data mining, email filtering

Neil Millar Lancaster University (oral presentation)

20th Century Changes in Modal Verb Frequencies

Diachronic changes in 20th century English represent an interesting area of language study. Although for many still within living memory, such changes are often beyond the reach of intuition. The Brown family of corpora (comparable texts from the early 1960s and early 1990s) have produced interesting insights into such language change. One such finding is the decline of modal verbs in American and British English reported by Leech (2003). Using the recently released 100 plus million word diachronic corpus of TIME magazine (Davies, 2007), this study analysed the frequencies of the same modal verbs during the period 1923-2007. The highly calibrated analysis allowed for statistical modelling of change that presents a surprisingly different patterns of change. Although certain modal verbs have fallen in frequency, as a group the overall pattern of change is found to be one of growth. Qualitative and quantitative explanatory analyses suggest changes in modal verb frequen-cies may be accounted for by the increase of semi-modal verbs and shifts in usage. Results appear to lend support to the explanatory hypotheses of colloquialization, democratization and stylistic change. Important methodological implications are found in investigation of the discrepancies between the results from the TIME corpus and the Brown corpora. Firstly, analyses sug-gest that the wide range of text types in the Brown corpora may depict changes that are more an artefact of representation than an illustration of the pattern of overall change. This paper argues that an advantage of working with a single source corpus is that claims, al-though necessarily limited, are securely grounded. Secondly, as the analyses show that dia-chronic frequency changes are far from smooth, comparison between only two data points can present a picture of change that contradicts the overall pattern. In order to gain a clear overview of any trend and allow for accurate statistical modeling, data from multiple chronological points is highly desirable. Key words: modal verbs, diachronic corpora, 20th century language change




Nora Zahrani University of York (oral presentation)

Prosodic (Non-) Marking of Repair in Arabic Spontaneous Speech

The phenomenon of repair has received sporadic attention from researchers in diverse fields over the past two decades. From a psycholinguistic approach, Levelt and Cutler (1983) have identified two types of repair: lexical repair (e.g. first brow- er, yellow and a green disk) and appropriateness repair (e.g. ... dark brown crossing- T-crossing). L&C showed that when repairs involve an “error” (as in lexical repairs), speakers tend to produce them as prosodically marked by means of higher pitch and greater intensity. In a sociologi-cally oriented approach, Schegloff has claimed that turn initial positions are a possible locus for a kind of self-repair he termed re-beginnings. My present research aims to provide better understanding of same-turn self-repair (STSR) through cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon, working within a Conversation Analytic frame work, a data-driven approach in which observations and claims are based on the observable behaviour of participants. This paper demonstrates that Levelt & Cutler's typology of self-repair holds in Arabic as well, since speakers rely on prosody when no alteration is needed to the syntactic constitu-ent (e.g. gonna go to Mecc-Jeddah, where the first syllable of Jeddah is produced at a higher pitch and a with greater intensity), whilst prosody does not play a major role when speakers produce a STSR that requires syntactic alteration to the projected speech (e.g. where is he, where in Riyadh, where does he work in Riyadh?). Also, we demonstrate in Arabic a parallel to Schegloff's finding that turn initial positions are a recurrent location of a type of self-repair related to turn reformulation (a sub-type of L&C’s appropriateness repair). These findings results also echo findings in computational linguistics where the inclusion of prosody in the speech recognition systems helps improves its performance, especially in the case of with lexical repairs, which might be are difficult to model based on lexical recogni-tion only (Shriberg, 1997). Key words: Repair; Phonetics; Conversation Analysis; Spontaneous; Speech

Rob Drummond University of Manchester

(oral presentation)

Investigating the Influence of Local Accent on the Pronunciation of Non-native English Speakers in Manchester

Although there is a considerable amount of established research into the acquisition of a second dialect within the same language (e.g. Payne 1980; Chambers 1992; Munro, Derwing et al 1999; Sankoff 2004) there has been very little investigation into dialect acquisition in a second language (Sharma 2005; Fox and McGory 2007; McGory, Frieda and Fox, in press). This acquisition can occur when non-native speakers of English are exposed to a dialect that is different from that with which they are familiar (be that a pedagogical model or a notion of a ‘standard’ dialect). My research addresses this topic by looking at the extent to which the pronunciation of Polish people living in Manchester, who are using English as a second language, is influenced by the local accent. This will be achieved by treating the inherent variability of a speaker’s interlanguage as being a system of variable rules, open to the probabilistic constraints of sociolinguistic and linguistic factors. Although five phonological features of a Manchester accent have been identified as rele-vant, this paper will primarily focus only on the vowel sound in ‘STRUT’ words. Data is being gathered through recorded informal interviews and a task involving the description of cartoon pictures. Preliminary results suggest that while some people do acquire features of the local accent into their own pronunciation, this acquisition is not a foregone conclusion and, at least at first glance, appears to be inconsistent. Variables being investigated in order to explain the degree of acquisition include: amount of exposure to the local accent, moti-vation, desire to integrate, attitude towards the local accent and accent change, amount of L1/L2 use, amount of formal instruction, length of time in Manchester, and perceptual ability; variables to be investigated in order to explain the apparent inconsistency in acquisi-tion include: lexical frequency, lexical simplicity, phonemic similarity to L1, phonemic con-text, syllable stress and orthography. This paper will report on findings so far by providing examples of this acquisition and of-fering some initial thoughts as to the relevance of various factors influencing the degree of acquisition amongst the participants. Key words: Sociolinguistic variation, L2 dialect acquisition, interlanguage phonology.




Rong Rong Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Stylistic Study Of Film: (Im)Politeness In ‘The Joy Luck Club’ (1993)

Film dialogue has always been neglected by film audience, scholars and film directors. Here I investigate the significance of film dialogue and its interrelation with the non-linguistic elements. I will apply the traditional linguistic approach, the (im)politeness theories in par-ticular, to examine the role of dialogue in the film The Joy Luck Club (1993), how it co-operates with the visuals. Politeness theories focus on how social harmony is achieved by verbal communication, while impoliteness theories have received a greater amount of work concerning how com-municative strategies create social disruption. Intending to bring out the importance of linguistics in studying film dialogue, I have chosen two consecutive extracts: (i) a bragging scene between two Chinese mothers, and (ii) a verbal conflict between one of the mothers and her daughter. The bragging scene is concerned with how fake politeness is applied to defend each interac-tant’s face. I will demonstrate (i) how “face” can be extended and foregrounded, (ii) how the inherent impolite illocutions (e.g. bragging) are mediated by using polite acts (e.g. com-plimenting), and (iii) how the interactants’ physical behaviours reinforce the fake politeness. The second scene shows how the daughter’s linguistic behaviour is extremely face-threatening. I will discuss that (i) the daughter’s impoliteness actually reduces the effect of social disruption due to her being a child and (ii) how the non-linguistic elements (e.g. cam-erawork, performance, etc.) collaborate with the conversation to convey characters’ rela-tionships. Key words: Film stylistics, politeness, impoliteness, bragging, verbal conflict, The Joy Luck Club (1993).

Sachiyo Nishikawa Lancaster University (poster presentation)

The Impact of two Different Modes of Input on L2 Speech Production of Adult Japanese Learners

This paper reports an investigation of a small scale pilot study on the fundamental impact of prior oral and textual input on subsequent speech. In speech production, the input may have a distinct effect on the quality of speech. The linguistic component from each differ-ent mode of input seems to be processed into the output phase (Martin & Wu, 2005). In general, it is therefore likely that task repetition may promote qualitative changes, generat-ing target-like speech. Thus, this pilot study was carried out to explore the relationship between the two different modes of input and speech production through task repetition by providing participants with a story retelling task as short-term intervals. In the study, the cohort (N=4) was di-vided into two groups based on the results of a 3000 word vocabulary level test (Nation, 2001). At Time 1, both groups performed the same oral narrative task with visual aids after receiving the respective input: Group 1 was provided with an oral input (i.e. tape) and was asked to retell the story; Group 2 was given a short text and was also required to retell the story. The participants were asked to perform the same speaking task in one week (i.e. Time 2). All the speech production at Time 1 and 2 were recorded and transcribed for analyses in terms of complexity of speech and fluency. AS-units (the analysis of speech unit) proposed by Foster et al. (2000) was used to measure complexity. Further, temporal variables (i.e. mean length of run, articulation rate, phonation time ratio, and speaking rate) were utilised in order to investigate fluency. Preliminary results indicate that task repetition seems to be associated with increase in mean length of run. Additionally, in order to explore the fundamental impact of different mode of input on speech production, the further qualitative analysis (e.g. comparing transcripts at Time 1 and 2) might reveal what linguistic information could be retained and triggered in speech productions. Key words: task-based language learning, L2 speech production, task repetition




Sandra Kotzor University of Oxford (oral presentation)

Buy:Sell And Chase:Flee Converses on the Continuum of Antonym Canonicity

The distinction between ‘canonical’ (hot:cold) and ‘non-canonical’ (mild:freezing) antonyms has always played a central role in research on opposition, which frequently only considered antonyms of the canonical kind. Until fairly recently, the distinction was widely accepted but the mechanisms behind this overt dichotomy were rarely the focus of research. ‘Canonical’ antonyms have long been considered a unique case of opposition and their special relation was explored from various angles (e.g. Deese 1965, Lyons 1977, Cruse 1986, Jones 2002). The dichotomy assumed by some researchers in the field has recently been replaced with the proposition of a continuum of antonym canonicity, which does not allow any clear distinction (cf. Paradis et al. 2007). Within my research into the mechanisms be-hind canonicity of several kinds of lexical opposition (especially the question whether fre-quency of co-occurrence really is the deciding factor) in English and German, I have con-ducted a goodness-of-exemplar rating as well as an investigation of frequency of co-occurrence2 of 150 canonical and non-canonical antonym pairs3. The results of both have confirmed the notion of a continuum of canonicity and have also shown interesting dis-crepancies in certain pairs between the predicted (either from previous literature or from frequency of co-occurrence measures) place of the pair on the continuum and the one the combination of results suggest. One such case where this was particularly obvious was that of converses (e.g. buy:sell, chase:flee, parent:child) which are traditionally often not included in discussions of antonymy (cf. Cruse 1968), as they are not considered “antonymy proper”. However, they also operate on the principle of minimal difference, which is a key factor in determining the strength of the antonymic relation. The GOE-rating results, for example, show that verbal converses tend to score very high compared even to very good canonical pairs (attack:defend (1.40)4; give:take (1.55); buy:sell (1.75) vs. uneven:even (1.60); young:old (1.43)) and much higher than nominal converses (doctor:patient (doctor:patient (2.50); mentor:protégé (2.90)). The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, I will be taking a closer look at converse-ness and argue, using data gathered from corpus research, judgement tasks and lexical deci-sion experiments, that converses should be considered part of antonymy. Secondly, I will consider the theoretical implications resulting from this claim for the criteria put forward for “good” opposition. Key words: lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics

Sheena Kaur Lancaster University (oral presentation)

A Corpus-based Study of Gender Representation in Malaysian School Children’s Writing

This paper reports on an ongoing doctoral research project which examines how gender is linguistically represented and constructed in a 121,847 word corpus of writing by Malaysian children, known as the Malaysian Corpus of Children’s Writing (MCCW). The corpus con-sists of texts compiled from a children’s column of an English language Malaysian newspa-per and from a primary school in Malaysia. In total, it contains contributions from 1,119 primary school children aged between 8 to 12. The study uses WordSmith 4 (Scott 2004) to derive keyword lists by comparing frequency lists of the girls and boys writing. These ‘gendered keywords’ are then subjected to concordance and collocational analyses (e.g. Baker 2006) in order to investigate their contextual uses and semantic preferences (Stubbs 2001: 65).) The research aims to answer two main questions: 1) What do the vocabulary choices in the writing of girls and boys in Malaysia reveal about how children construct their identities and those of others? and 2) How do these identity constructions relate to the social and cultural contexts of living in Malaysia? The analysis shows a marked difference in how boys and girls represent themselves and others. Some issues relating to corpus design such as transcription of the children’s handwritten texts will also be briefly discussed. Key words: corpus linguistics, gender, children’s writing, keywords, collocations.




Sheryl Prentice Lancaster University (poster presentation)

Exploring the Validity of the Web as a Corpus:

Matching Frequency Results for Rare Constructions from Google UK with the BNC This paper focuses on the issue of how valid it is to use the web as a corpus for syntactic research. I will do this by comparing the extent to which frequency results obtained from Google web pages match the frequency results from a carefully designed corpus, in this case the British National Corpus (BNC). In order to compare like with like as far as possi-ble, the web data will consist of UK only based web pages in an attempt to compare the BNC with British English data on the web. This, of course, does not eliminate the probabil-ity that data from many non-British authors will still end up being included. The issue of authorship, as well as many other issues associated with using web data, will be discussed. My comparison will be based on the frequency of occurrence (rather than use) of three different rare grammatical constructions (and, more specifically, their frequency of occur-rence with particular pronouns). The constructions were entered into Google and the BNC’s search engines respectively. This gave raw frequency counts. The results were filtered first to exclude irrelevant occur-rences, such as constructions occurring across sentence boundaries. In order to compare across the corpora, relative frequencies were also established using the total number of words in the BNC and estimating the total number of words on the web. The latter is, of course, potentially problematic, particularly because of the web’s constant change in size and inconsistency of results. The method used in this paper (calculating the web’s size based on consistently occurring monograms) will attempt to address such issues. Any dif-ferences in the relative frequencies between the corpora were then tested for statistical significance using the log-likelihood test. If there are no significant differences, then we can say that the results from Google UK are a good match for those of the BNC. The frequency results from Google UK do match those from the BNC for the chosen rare constructions to a certain extent. However, the usefulness of the web as opposed to a tradi-tional corpus for the research of rare grammatical constructions depends on the construc-tion under investigation. This is a result of a number of factors, including a construction’s novelty or archaicness (given that, for example, the web is somewhat younger than the BNC), its use in particular genres or by particular speakers. Key words: corpus linguistics, grammatical constructions, frequency counts, validity, com-parison

Shuchen Chang Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Thought Presentation in Simplified Readers:

the Consequences of Simplification and Implications for Text Comprehension In the context of second and foreign language education, simplified readers are generally accepted by teachers and students as a good source of reading material and reading pro-grams that use such readers have also been established to promote extensive reading in and out of classroom on the belief that ‘reading is its own reward’. However, the reward will only be likely to appear if the books are good materials and at an appropriate level of diffi-culty. This study is devoted to the discussion of these issues in two specific aspects: how character discourse (thought, in particular) is presented in simplified readers and what the implications are for text comprehension. In this study I compare the language and content of Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The garden-party’ and its simplified version (the Pen-guin Readers series), using the speech, thought presentation model developed by Semino and Short (2004) as the framework for the analysis of discourse presentation. The comparison shows that there is a tendency in the simplified version of moving from the more direct, (the character’s) end of thought presentation to the more indirect (the narrator’s) end along the cline of a set of categories and reducing the shifts of point-of-view in the attempt to stick to a narration with more narratorial control. Readers are given less access to the inter-nal process of the characters and are likely to find it more difficult to understand their emo-tional twists and turns and how they relate to one another. Another potential problem is the highly uneven distribution of freer forms of thought presentation in different parts of the simplified story. It is questionable whether the simplifying strategy would serve to produce a more readable text or whether it would perplex the readers with an ‘indigestible’ amount of free discourse. Key words: simplifications, interpretation, thought presentation




Simon Kinzley Lancaster University (poster presentation)

Chinese Undergraduates Studying Academic Writing on the Lancaster University EAP and Study Skills

Pre-Sessional Course: Do they do what we tell them to and does it really help them? This presentation reports on the results of a study tracking a group of Chinese undergradu-ate students from the start of the Lancaster University Pre-Sessional Course through to the end of their second term of study for an undergraduate degree in Media and Cultural Stud-ies. This was done through an analysis of student writing and the feedback they received from their EAP tutors and degree programme lecturers throughout the period as well as through interviews with the students themselves and with five of their lecturers. The study is primarily concerned with whether these students adopt rhetorical strategies such as critical evaluation and inter-conceptual structuring that are advocated on the Pre-Sessional Course once they have actually begun their degrees and also considers whether there is a link between adoption of these strategies and academic success. The findings indicate that the students do adopt these strategies to a considerable extent and also that there is a posi-tive relationship between their adoption and academic success. Key words: English for Academic Purposes (EAP), rhetorical strategies, innovation bundle diffusion

Steve Disney Lancaster University (oral presentation)

The Uses and History of BE going to + infinitive in English

This paper examines the development of ‘BE going to + infinitive’ and its PDE uses, draw-ing on the BNC (e.g. 1-3 below) and Helsinki corpora as well as data taken from literary sources including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. The construction is a classic example of a grammaticalized verb of motion taking on a future meaning, a common and well docu-mented cross-linguistic development (Heine and Kuteva 2002, Bybee et al 1994, Croft 2000). The paper briefly traces the history of the construction, from OE to the 19thC, from lexical ‘going to’ (1) to a marker of a future intention (2). 1) ‘Yet still you smile like a bride going to meet her bridegroom!’ she murmured 2) ‘You should be pleased. We’re going to celebrate your getting well.’ The main focus of the paper is on the construction in PDE where a development over the last 150 years or so has arisen that allows speakers to also use it to refer to a future event that has a present cause or evidence (Leech 2004: 58); the so-called ‘predictive’ use (3). 3) I know from past experience, that creating that mailing list is going to take approxi-mately sixteen hours of my time. The precise difference between the uses is not clear cut and I describe here a semantic continuum with a fuzzy boundary between them using examples from the BNC. I also show how the distribution of the uses varies across genre. Given this more semantically bleached ‘new’ use, its distribution, and the fact that in its spoken form the construction is often phonetically reduced to ['gΛnə], I argue that it can to a great extent be considered a grammaticalized evidential and can be applied to the universal map of evidential and episte-mological semantic space described by Anderson (1986). The map also shows some com-mon grammaticalization paths leading to evidential uses, but does not show a progressive motion verb as developing an evidential predictive use such as in (3). I attempt to show how the map can represent the fact that predictive uses of BE going to + infinitive are very close semantically to predictive uses of will, an area of epistemological modality that bor-ders evidential space. In my paper, the BE going to + infinitive construction’s evidential function is compared and contrasted with such similar uses, and the semantic map is ad-justed and filled out accordingly. Key words: going to, grammaticalization, semantic map, corpus, tense, evidential, pragmat-ics, modality




Thomas T. Ristimaki University of Wales (oral presentation)

‘Killer Sharks in a Sea of Custard!’ – Imagery Realities with Real World Effects

This paper explores the collaborative negotiation of context and strategic redefinition of reality through language and interaction, with an emphasis on framing, conceptual blending, and integrated action. Drawing on natural language data collected through participant-observation in several (subjectively) challenging situations – from rock-climbing to firewalk-ing – it uses pragmatics and discourse analysis to investigate imaginary realities that affect behaviour and interaction in the real world. My focus is on the way professional facilitators are able to establish shared (short-term) expectations and subtly promote a preferred interpretation of specific activities or experi-ences through language use. As a result of their social role and context-based authority, leaders are often in a position to redefine reality by using discourse to influence other people’s mental models, and various examples illustrate how language can convince people to at-tempt the ‘impossible’ and engage in activities that cannot ‘realistically’ be done. Although some of these activities involve pretend play, others are ‘serious’ challenges associated with real risks (Coates 2007; Bateson 2000). By prompting the creation of imaginative metaphors and blended mental spaces (Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Fauconnier 1985), effective facilita-tors can create (imaginary) conditions or incentives for increased participation and trigger target behaviour through integrated action. Since there may be more than one thing going on at once, extracts of talk in interaction also demonstrate strategic frame-shifting as par-ticipants change their ‘footing’ (Goffman 1981) to reflect alternative interpretations of con-text. Whether the activity involves rappelling down a coastal cliff or walking barefoot across red-hot coals, participants are never forced to do anything against their will, and although these are superficially goal-oriented activities, their underlying purpose is to trigger a shift in per-spective and create a meaningful experience in order to develop real self-confidence, coopera-tion, and communication skills that can be applied in everyday life.

Key words: pragmatics, framing, conceptual blending, imagination, empowerment

Xu Zhang Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Categories Revealed by English Classifier-like Words: A Case Study of ‘Sheet/Sheet of’

Classifiers are overt linguistic categorisation devices and ‘a unique window’ into human cognition (Lakoff, 1986). Extensive studies have been conducted on the categorisation process revealed by classifiers, e.g. Lakoff (1986; 1987), Craig (1986), and Tai (1994). Eng-lish is traditionally regarded as a non-classifier language, but a closer look discovers that English also possesses classifier-like words which are syntactically, semantically, and func-tionally similar to numeral classifiers, e.g. ‘a sheet of paper’ and ‘a cup of tea’.

This paper focuses on the cognitive categorisation process underlying the English classifier-words’ usage. Based on examples extracted from the BNC corpus, and following the cogni-tive methodology by Lakoff (1986) and Tai (1990; 1994), the present paper will take the saliently 2-dimensional shape-denoting ‘sheet/sheets of’ as an exemplar, and examine the category organisation of this classifier-like word.

150 concordances of ‘sheet/sheets of’ are extracted from BNC and then regrouped. It shows that ‘sheet’ can collocate with words like (1) ‘paper’; (2) ‘bronze’, ‘glass’; (3) ‘water’, ‘ice’; (4) ‘flame’, ‘sky’; (5) ‘sounding’, ‘agony’. From (1) to (5), the ‘sheet’ category is ex-tended from the saliently flat-shaped to the shapeless and the amorphous, and from the concrete to the abstract; the extension is realised by various models, typically via family resemblance and aided by metonymies or metaphors.

The examination indicates that the overt categorisation mechanism of classifiers is also at work in non-classifier language of English, and this study will contribute to a general knowledge of human cognition of categories.

Key words: classifier, category, family resemblance, metonymy, metaphor




Yu-Hua Chen Lancaster University (oral presentation)

Investigating Lexical Bundles in NS and NNS Writing

This study conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of a learner corpus of writing from L1 Chinese learners of L2 English and two native English corpora, attempting to explore and identify the similarities and differences in recurrent word combinations be-tween native-speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) writing. Thus far, very few stud-ies have extended attention outward to the discourse aspect of learner writing by examining large quantities of empirical data. The present study addressed a textual and corpus-based perspective, i.e. to investigate interlanguage through ‘lexical bundles’, a frequency-driven approach which focuses on the phraseological aspect of language. A 150,000-word learner corpus of NNS essays were compared with two NS corpora: native novice writing and native professional writing. The former consists of term essays written by British undergraduates, who are generally considered novice writers despite having Eng-lish as L1. The latter was extracted from the academic component in the FLOB corpus, which can be viewed as writing in Standard English that learners wish to acquire as an ulti-mate goal of learning. On the basis of the structural and functional frameworks built by Biber et al. (1999, 2003, 2004), it was found that the proportions of bundle types in NNS essays and NS undergraduate essays are surprisingly similar. They both contained more clausal bundles (e.g. it can be seen) and more stance expressions (e.g. is no doubt that) and discourse organisers (e.g. on the other hand). By contrast, professional NS writers exhibited a wider range of phrasal bundles (e.g. the nature of the) and referential markers (e.g. in the context of). However, a further qualitative examination revealed that NS undergraduate writing shared far more identical bundles with NS professional writing rather than with NNS writing. The results have implications for both L1 and L2 writing education. Some issues raised from defining lexical bundles will also be discussed. Key words: corpus linguistics, learner corpora, lexical bundles, phraseology




Organising Committee

Chair: Wesam Ibrahim

Secretaries: Maryam Paknahad Jabarooty

Treasurers: Emad Abdul-Latif & Shuchen Chang

Venue co-ordinator: Steve Disney

Poster co-ordinator: Sachiyo Nishikawa

Abstracts co-ordinator: Mazura Muhammad

Programme Managers: Amir Salama & Bernhard Forchtner

Technical Officer/webmaster: Neil Millar

Academic Committee:

Acknowledgments The organising committee wishes to thank our sponsors:

The Department of Linguistics and

English Language, Lancaster University

We would also like to thank the following people for their help and as-

sistance in making this conference possible:

Anna Siewierska, Anne Stubbins, Eivind Torgersen, Elaine Heron, Elena Semino, Gila Schauer, Jane Sunderland, Jane Sunderland, Marjorie Woods, Martin Bygate, Mick Short, Paul Baker, Uta Papen, Veronika Koller, Willem Hollmann

And all those who have offered their assistance in any way or form.

Session moderators:

Amir Salama Bernhard Forchtner Dawn Perkins Emad Abdul-Latif Filipa Ribeiro Jing Wen Kate Torkington

Mazura Mohamed Neil Millar Sachiyo Nishikawa Sheena Kaur Shuchen Chang Steve Disney Yu-Hua Chen

Alexandra Polyzou Alexandra Polyzou Bernhard Forchtner Costas Gabrielatos Ghada Mohamed John Heywood Kathy Lee

Mahmood Abasabadi Mazura Muhammad Michelle Rong Ruth Gregson Sheena Kaur Steve Disney Wesam Ibrahim

the third lancaster university postgraduate … issues in critical discourse analysis: a discussion...

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