The syllabuses I have designed and produced in the past five semesters have primarily targeted students who have registered for mandatory pre-service undergraduate and optional in-service postgraduate courses at the English Department (English Applied Linguistics Department since September 1998) of Janus Pannonius University, Pécs. The first written product a student received from me had to be perfect in every respect: it had to address the reader so that she or he felt the course was designed with individual needs in mind. It had to provide all the necessary information to set the context of exploration and learning for what was to follow. And it had to arouse curiosity in the content of the sessions and the content of the written assignments to complete.
By 1996, when I first met such a group of students, I had been teaching at the department for seven years. Since 1992, I had also been collecting student scripts by those participants in Language Practice, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Methodology, and Introduction to Indian Literature in English courses who were willing to share with me the electronic copy of their essays and research papers.
Between 1992 and 1999, I have collected such scripts from over 300 students--as of the end of January 1999, the corpus consisted of over 400,000 words. By sharing with me their ideas, findings, and opinions in print and on disk, these students have enabled me to gather information for the study of written learner English as a Foreign Language (EFL).
This dissertation is concerned with the description and analysis of advanced writing in EFL. It provides a curricular and syllabus development focus as it takes account of writing pedagogy processes at Janus Pannonius University. The course content of undergraduate and postgraduate English-major students was studied. Using authentic records, the dissertation attempts to cover a wide spectrum of issues related to EFL students' writing skills in a variety of text types. The description and analysis of over 300 students' scripts, in the JPU Corpus, is presented to address the aspect of processing products.
The dissertation is a cross-disciplinary undertaking: it is informed by writing pedagogy via classroom observations made over the years of Writing and Research Skills courses. It is also motivated by current empirical interest in exploiting machine-readable collections of written and spoken texts for language description, lexicography, discourse analysis and corpus-based language education techniques such as data-driven learning. The fundamental question it attempts to explore and answer is how the description of scripts written by advanced Hungarian university students of EFL can contribute to an understanding of writing processes and products.
Why develop a learner corpus? The endeavor holds potential benefits in at least three areas, each of which will be explored in this dissertation:
On the corpus linguistics pane, the following areas will be considered: the theory of performance and competence, theoretical arguments for and against corpus evidence, the nature and empirical use of corpus matter, and data-driven learning that exploits both native and learner corpora.
Chapter One sets the context of the study by providing a description and analysis of theoretical issues and empirical research in the fields of contrastive rhetoric, writing pedagogy and materials development. It presents the outcomes of continued cooperation between the teaching profession and academia. After evaluating the claims product- and the process-oriented writing instruction has made, it concludes by setting the research agenda for integrating learner writing development procedures with the method of corpus linguistics.
Chapter Two then pursues how this can be done by presenting relevant corpus linguistic research. After an analysis of the underlying theoretical considerations and a historical overview of the development of the corpus linguistic method, it aims to provide a detailed explanation of variables in corpus planning, development and manipulation. The chapter ends with the discussion of the specific nature of learner corpora, the development of which represents an exciting new vista in both language pedagogy and corpus linguistics. By presenting the composition and application of the International Corpus of Learner English, the chapter concludes by explaining that the study of learner scripts can contribute to enhancing the authenticity of writing pedagogy.
Following the reviews, Chapter Three presents, employing a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, the writing pedagogy procedures at the English Department of Janus Pannonius University, focusing on the Writing and Research Skills courses I taught in the past three years.
Chapter Four presents compositional details of the JPU Corpus and the results of empirical research. It examines linguistic data drawn from the corpus and a set of examples of the pedagogical exploitation of that data for writing skills development. As will be seen, the largest Hungarian EFL learner corpus offers opportunities to describe the lexical and text organization patterns of written learner discourse. Another contribution of this chapter to the field is the collection of concordance-based descriptions and evaluations of learner scripts, which allow for the development of study guides for individual and group use.
The study's conclusions suggest that the JPU Corpus has the potential for further nationwide, and possibly international, cooperation between corpus linguists and writing professionals.
A sample of Appendix documentation completes the main text (not available in this online edition).