LINGUIST List 13.1737

Wed Jun 19 2002

Disc: Review: Applied Ling: Hinkel (2002)

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. GNJabbour, Disc: New: Review: Applied Ling.:Hinkel (2002)

	
Reference to Ronald Sheen's Posting
(Linguist 13.1729)

Research methodology in corpus linguistics is generally built on
establishing comparative frameworks between texts. Hinkel (2002) has
constructed a two-level framework. The first level looks at corpus
linguistics research performed on "expert" or "reference" corpora to
derive items of interest in the literature, while the second reports
on native students' writing versus non-native writers regarding the
use of those derived items. For teaching purposes, it is also believed
that the statistical processing of texts places those texts further
away from an immediate teaching context. Research of the sort enhances
teaching indirectly, at the expense of providing immediate instances
for teaching purposes.

Tribble (2001) states that in writing four areas are important,
"knowledge of content, writing processes, context, and language
system" (Abstract). Most developmental writing texts, even those
specifically written for an ESL audience, deal with two areas, content
and writing processes (e.g. Academic Writing [Leki 1998], Patterns for
College Writing [Kirshner and Mandell 2001], and Patterns for a
Purpose[Clouse 1999]). They assume that the language system has
already been taken care of, or will be taken care of as students
develop their content knowledge, and as they refine their text through
multiple revisions. Hinkel's text comes right in place to give
evidence, to teachers, of language areas where students need help.

In reference to language varieties dealt with, Hinkel (2002)
definitely limits her research to a handful of Asian non-English
speakers, including the Middle East. I believe that her data represent
her non-native student population majorities. On the same note,
Granger (1998) includes research that deals with acquisition of
English by natives of European and non-European languages, such as
French, Finnish, Spanish and Swedish, as well as others. Unlike
traditional linguistic research built on well-defined hypotheses,
corpus linguistics deals with observations, and text descriptions.

Note: I am sorry for the delay in my response.

References: 
Granger, S. (1998) Learner English on Computer, Longman London and New York: 
Addison Wesley
Tribble, C. (2001) "Small corpora and teaching writing: a corpus-informed 
pedagogy of writing" in Mohsen Ghadessy, Alex Henry and Robert L.Roseburry 
(Eds.) Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and Practice, 
Amesterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp382-406