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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2016

Writing at University: A Corpus for Studying Students' Skills and Needs

Résumé

Writing research in France traditionally focused on the very beginning of the acquisition of writing skills (David & Morin, 2013; Leclaire-Halté & Rondelli, 2014; Plane, 2003). Numerous studies described and highlighted the difficulties encountered by young writers and one of the main challenges was designing teaching materials which facilitated this acquisition. In the last decade a new interest has emerged, examining writing skills at higher levels of education (Delcambre & Lahanier-Reuter, 2012; Pollet, 2012). This new focus is due to increased awareness of the need to continue writing instruction even at university. French universities do not have writing centers as in the USA. Some degree programs in French universities propose writing courses, but they are usually restricted to students majoring in Literary studies or Linguistics, or to foreign students. Hence, the needs of undergraduate and even graduate students are still only partially understood. For this reason, a few years ago our team began assembling a corpus of student writing (Jacques & Rinck, forthcoming) which we refer to as ``Advanced Literacy'' because it comprises writings from the first up to the fifth year of university. I will present in detail the principles we followed in order to make this corpus ``searchable'' with the help of the methods and tools of Corpus Linguistics. It includes different genres of texts, from several universities, written by students with different majors, in response to a variety of writing instructions. Each file is provided with metadata so as to allow a selection of the texts under different criteria, e.g. level, genre of text, etc. Each subpart of the corpus contains at least ten texts, to ensure a sufficient number of occurrences of the phenomena to be studied. I will illustrate the kind of research which the corpus supports with an example: the choice of verbs and their syntactic structure when citing someone else's work. Students often make mistakes either when choosing the verb or when inserting it in the sentence. In the first case, they misunderstand or are not aware of the semantico-pragmatic value of the verb (using for example prétendre \textendash to claim \textendash instead of dire \textendash to say). In the second case, they erroneously combine the verb with a preposition or omit the preposition. The corpus search makes it possible to observe regularities and to assess which constructions remain tricky for students, even in higher education.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-01903420 , version 1 (24-10-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01903420 , version 1

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Marie-Paule Jacques. Writing at University: A Corpus for Studying Students' Skills and Needs. “College Writing” From the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar to Tomorrow, Aug 2016, Dartmouth, United States. ⟨hal-01903420⟩

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