Materials for EAP: a corpus-based study of the use of reporting verbs

Dr. Hui Ling Lang (Ming Chuan University, Taiwan)

Tuesday 19 April, 1300-1400, Room TBA

Reference to previous studies is a defining feature of the academic research articles and writers manifest this act through 'reporting'. There is a variety of ways in which writers perform the act of 'reporting', including the use of references and reporting verbs, which L2 student writers find particularly difficult to handle. An appropriate starting point for investigating students' problems is the analysis of students' work, while, surprisingly, a review of the existing literature on both references and reporting verbs reveals that studies have been largely focused on research articles as a text type.

This corpus-based study was performed on two corpora of completed literature reviews written by 12 Taiwanese postgraduate Business students studying in the UK, with a focus on their use of reporting verbs. Data was collected from six dissertations with grade 'A' and six with a passing mark in order to see whether there were differences between the use of reporting verbs in both corpora. This analysis was performed using an adaptation of Thompson and Ye (1991) and SPSS software.

Results of the text analysis show that there are certain differences in terms of the distribution, frequency, and particularity of reporting verbs used by the two groups and there are no statistically significant differences. There are also hints of disciplinary differences in register. The comparison between the two corpora provides an understanding of possible target behaviours of Taiwanese students and offer certain suggestions and implications for materials of EAP students.

Dr Lang obtained her PhD degree from the Language and Literacy Studies at University of Manchester in 2004. She is now an assistant professor and a co-ordinator of the Writing committee at the Department of Applied English in Ming Chuan University in Taiwan. Her research interests include English for Academic Purposes (EAP), in particular, Academic Writing, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Genre Analysis, TESOL Methodology, Corpus Linguistics, and Inter-relationship between reading and writing.