The impact of genre on EFL learner writing: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis Perspective

Paquot, Magali [UCL] Biber, Douglas [Northern Arizona University]

(eng) Previous learner corpus-based studies have shown that EFL learner languages exhibit shared linguistic features irrespective of the learners’ first languages. For example, it has repeatedly been reported that EFL learner writing is characterized by a more involved style than the writing of their native peers, as evidenced by a high number of writer/reader (W/R) visibility features such as first and second person pronouns, let’s imperatives, epistemic modal adverbs (e.g. certainly, maybe) and questions (cf. e.g. Petch-Tyson 1998, Altenberg and Tapper 1998; Aijmer, 2002; Narita & Sugiura, 2006; Neff et al. 2007; Gilquin & Paquot, 2008; Hasselgård, 2009). Most of these learner corpus research (LCR) studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on argumentative writing and it is therefore questionable whether their results can be generalized to other genres and ultimately be used to inform English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogical materials (Gilquin et al., 2007). To use the example of involvement features again, as noted by Recski (2004), in the case of argumentative essays such as those contained in the widely used International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, Granger et al. 2009), “personal references and subjective attitudes are certainly hard to avoid”, since learners are explicitly prompted to give their personal opinions. This study is part of a larger body of research that seeks to investigate whether the features commonly attributed to EFL learner writing are genuine characteristics of interlanguages or whether they are prompted by the argumentative type of texts that has usually been analysed in LCR. Paquot et al. (2013) analysed French and Norwegian learners’ use of a variety of W/R visibility features across genres, comparing argumentative texts from the ICLE with discipline-specific texts from the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA, http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-vespa.html). They showed that, when compared to native speakers’ writing within the same genre and discipline, texts produced by French and Norwegian learners systematically displayed an overuse of W/R visibility features. We adopt a broader perspective and build on a multi-dimensional analysis of a variety of native and learner corpora to further investigate the impact of genre on EFL learner writing. We make use of Biber’s (1988) linguistic features and dimensions to compare and contrast the same ICLE and VESPA sub-corpora as used in Paquot et al. (2013) as well as two corpora of student native writing (comparable subsets of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus) and a 1 million word corpus of published research articles in linguistics. Preliminary results suggest that French and Norwegian learners’ argumentative and discipline-specific texts are characterized by higher degrees of involvement (Dimension 1) and persuasiveness (Dimension 4) when set against comparable native speakers’ writing in terms of genre and discipline. They also point to strong L1-based differences (e.g. Norwegian learners’ argumentative and discipline-specific texts are much more involved than French learners’ texts). However, the various corpora used also cluster by genre, irrespective of L1 background, thus suggesting that learners adapt to genre requirements to some extent (cf. Paquot et al., 2013). The theoretical and pedagogical implications of this study will be discussed. We will also consider its implications in terms of corpus comparability and selection of a reference corpus in learner corpus research. References Aijmer, K. (2002). Modality in advanced Swedish learners’ written interlanguage. In S. Granger, J. Hung and S. 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