For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as f... more For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as foreign language and the mushrooming of Confucius Institutes through the efforts of promotion of the Chinese government. By the end of 2010, there have been more than 690 Confucius Institutes/Schools established in 96 countries/regions, most of which are with English as a dominant language. There is a growing concern and critique about the Chinese ideology and culture emerged with this rapid expansion may affect the world view of non-Chinese speakers. This study thus attempts to examine the issue from a perspective of corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Chinese textbook materials used in Confucius Institutes. The analysis will look at how the ideology and culture embedded in the reading materials have been reflected in the Chinese textbooks commonly used in Confucius Institutes around the world, and what culture images they have been projected to the learners. We will firstly build a corpus of reading texts to collect a dozen of Chinese textbooks widely used in those Confucius Institutes. Following on corpus annotation and content analysis, we hope our findings can capture the patterns of language use and cultural images identified and distributed in the texts. We believe that the selected teaching materials in the textbooks reflects an ideology that serves the interests of particular groups in society to the exclusion of others, and thus contributes a lot to the attitude of the learners towards the ideology and culture carried by the language itself.
This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage... more This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (the ICCI corpus), and how the corpus data can be explored with a sophisticated query package for learner language research. We first present the design and compilation of such a specialized corpus in compliance with corpus linguistics standards; next, we provide a comprehensive description of the steps undertaken to turn the hand-written paper collection into the creation of a linguistically annotated text corpus and its characteristics; finally, we report the corpus database built in-house, its query interface, and some innovative features for linguistic research.
This study investigates how young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from Chinese, Span... more This study investigates how young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from Chinese, Spanish, and Polish mother tongue backgrounds use interactional metadiscourse in descriptive and argumentative English essays by drawing data from the ICCI corpus. The quantitative and qualitative analyses show that (i) there are significant differences among the three groups of EFL learners in the use of boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers; and (ii) there are significant differences between the descriptive essays and the argumentative essays in the use of hedges and self-mentions. Discussion of the results is related to intergroup homogeneity and heterogeneity in the use of metadiscourse and the influences of essay types as well as topics/prompts. Pedagogical implications are provided for teaching interactional metadiscursive resources to young EFL learners from different mother tongue backgrounds and in relation to descriptive and argumentative writing.
Abstract The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chi... more Abstract The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese research articles (RAs) published in applied linguistics journals and to investigate how metadiscourse may contribute to knowledge construction in RAs. A small corpus in each language was built consisting of 20 journal articles in English and another 20 in Chinese. In order to highlight metadiscourse features, an established model of metadiscourse was adopted to annotate both Chinese and English articles. It was found that there are generally more metadiscourse features in the English sub-corpus than in the Chinese sub-corpus. While both English sub-corpus and Chinese sub-corpus were found to use statistically significantly more interactive metadiscourse resources (organising discourse) than interactional metadiscourse resources (indicating writers' attitude and stance to themselves, text and audience), the English sub-corpus employed statistically significantly more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese sub-corpus. Implications of this study are discussed for both English and Chinese academic writing, including the teaching of English writing as a second language (L2).
... to them, SCE serves the following functions: to create a feeling of solidarity (Richard and T... more ... to them, SCE serves the following functions: to create a feeling of solidarity (Richard and Tay 1977). ... Ltd. Luke, A., Freebody, P., Shun, L. and Gopinathan, S. (2005)Towards research-based innovation and reform: Singapore schooling in ... Xiao, R., McEnery, T and Qian YF (2006). ...
... EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS Paul Doyle and Hong Huaqing 1 ... PaulDoyle is an ... more ... EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS Paul Doyle and Hong Huaqing 1 ... PaulDoyle is an Assistant Professor with the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. ...
This project seeks to conduct an investigation and evaluation of the pedagogical approaches adopt... more This project seeks to conduct an investigation and evaluation of the pedagogical approaches adopted in the acquisition of English language literacy for low-waged, low-skilled adult learners of English in Singapore. The research focuses on the pedagogical approach undertaken in the curriculum and training programmes that have been delivered under Singapore's Workplace Literacy Programme through the approved Workplace Literacy Training Providers, and further determines the pedagogical approaches which would be most effective in enabling low-waged and low-skilled adult learners to acquire English literacy and meet programme outcomes.
The three groups identified in this project are found to have developed different Mandarin oral p... more The three groups identified in this project are found to have developed different Mandarin oral proficiencies in relation to their different exposures of language use at home in terms of their vocabulary coverage and code-switching. The CSF group has a much bigger ...
ABSTRACT: Colloquial Singapore English is an outer-circle variety that exhibits contact-induced l... more ABSTRACT: Colloquial Singapore English is an outer-circle variety that exhibits contact-induced lin-guistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, we address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the extent to which the diglossia is reducible to register variation. We investigate the usage pattern of two linguistic variables which have acquired novel grammatical meanings, and show that our data support the Singapore English diglossia, but the variation is greater than what is normal in register variation. The diglossia of which one variant is an outer-circle variety does not reduce easily to register variation. INTRODUCTION1 It is generally accepted in the scholarly literature that the English language in Singapore comprises two major varieties, the vernacular variety called Colloquial Singapore English, and the formal variety called Stan...
Well-aligned parallel texts are an excellent source of information for contrastive linguistic and... more Well-aligned parallel texts are an excellent source of information for contrastive linguistic and translation studies. There already exist quite a few alignment tools and parallel text concordancers, but the aligners found in the literature mostly work towards an automated alignment of words or sentences in a restrictive or ideal domain and context (Barlow 1995;
and volunteer faculty and students from Brigham Young University Wed Pre-conference workshop: Usi... more and volunteer faculty and students from Brigham Young University Wed Pre-conference workshop: Using R for Corpus Linguistics (4188 JFSB) 12:00 Retrieving corpus-linguistic data from corpora with R (Stefan Th. Gries) 4:30 Statistically analyzing data with R (Harald Baayen) Thurs 8:30 Welcome
Aristotle (Cooper 1960) defined rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering all the available me... more Aristotle (Cooper 1960) defined rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given situation. " The use of rhetoric in advertisements is universal just because of its strongly persuasive strengths. The use of rhetoric in a monolingual advertising context has been investigated by some researchers (Angela Goddard 1998; Phillips 2002; McQuarrie 1996; Leigh 1994; Lagerwerf 2005) while the contrast of rhetoric use in a bilingual/multilingual context has received relatively less attention (Villalobos 2004), and the comparative analysis regarding the use of repetition of sound, word and phrase is rarely seen. To probe into this issue with a corpus linguistics approach, based on the data from our ongoing project of a parallel corpus of English and Chinese advertisements in Singapore print media, this paper adopts McQuarrie and Mick's taxonomy (McQuarrie 1996) to investigate how different types of rhetorical figures are used in this corp...
As a mirror of present-day China, Chinese neologisms on new media are useful not only for linguis... more As a mirror of present-day China, Chinese neologisms on new media are useful not only for linguistic analysis but also for teaching advanced learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Through analysing the word-formation mechanisms or strategies of Chinese neologisms on new media, learners can not only reinforce their understanding about the unique linguistic features of the Chinese language that they acquired before but also obtain a better understanding of the social and cultural soil that nurtures and shapes the Chinese language and its development. Using a small corpus that consists of authentic usage samples of 50 neologisms originated from Chinese new media, we attempt to explain how information about neologism formation strategies can be utilized in teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language.
For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as f... more For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as foreign language and the mushrooming of Confucius Institutes through the efforts of promotion of the Chinese government. By the end of 2010, there have been more than 690 Confucius Institutes/Schools established in 96 countries/regions, most of which are with English as a dominant language. There is a growing concern and critique about the Chinese ideology and culture emerged with this rapid expansion may affect the world view of non-Chinese speakers. This study thus attempts to examine the issue from a perspective of corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Chinese textbook materials used in Confucius Institutes. The analysis will look at how the ideology and culture embedded in the reading materials have been reflected in the Chinese textbooks commonly used in Confucius Institutes around the world, and what culture images they have been projected to the learners. We will firstly build a corpus of reading texts to collect a dozen of Chinese textbooks widely used in those Confucius Institutes. Following on corpus annotation and content analysis, we hope our findings can capture the patterns of language use and cultural images identified and distributed in the texts. We believe that the selected teaching materials in the textbooks reflects an ideology that serves the interests of particular groups in society to the exclusion of others, and thus contributes a lot to the attitude of the learners towards the ideology and culture carried by the language itself.
This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage... more This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (the ICCI corpus), and how the corpus data can be explored with a sophisticated query package for learner language research. We first present the design and compilation of such a specialized corpus in compliance with corpus linguistics standards; next, we provide a comprehensive description of the steps undertaken to turn the hand-written paper collection into the creation of a linguistically annotated text corpus and its characteristics; finally, we report the corpus database built in-house, its query interface, and some innovative features for linguistic research.
This study investigates how young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from Chinese, Span... more This study investigates how young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from Chinese, Spanish, and Polish mother tongue backgrounds use interactional metadiscourse in descriptive and argumentative English essays by drawing data from the ICCI corpus. The quantitative and qualitative analyses show that (i) there are significant differences among the three groups of EFL learners in the use of boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers; and (ii) there are significant differences between the descriptive essays and the argumentative essays in the use of hedges and self-mentions. Discussion of the results is related to intergroup homogeneity and heterogeneity in the use of metadiscourse and the influences of essay types as well as topics/prompts. Pedagogical implications are provided for teaching interactional metadiscursive resources to young EFL learners from different mother tongue backgrounds and in relation to descriptive and argumentative writing.
Abstract The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chi... more Abstract The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese research articles (RAs) published in applied linguistics journals and to investigate how metadiscourse may contribute to knowledge construction in RAs. A small corpus in each language was built consisting of 20 journal articles in English and another 20 in Chinese. In order to highlight metadiscourse features, an established model of metadiscourse was adopted to annotate both Chinese and English articles. It was found that there are generally more metadiscourse features in the English sub-corpus than in the Chinese sub-corpus. While both English sub-corpus and Chinese sub-corpus were found to use statistically significantly more interactive metadiscourse resources (organising discourse) than interactional metadiscourse resources (indicating writers' attitude and stance to themselves, text and audience), the English sub-corpus employed statistically significantly more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese sub-corpus. Implications of this study are discussed for both English and Chinese academic writing, including the teaching of English writing as a second language (L2).
... to them, SCE serves the following functions: to create a feeling of solidarity (Richard and T... more ... to them, SCE serves the following functions: to create a feeling of solidarity (Richard and Tay 1977). ... Ltd. Luke, A., Freebody, P., Shun, L. and Gopinathan, S. (2005)Towards research-based innovation and reform: Singapore schooling in ... Xiao, R., McEnery, T and Qian YF (2006). ...
... EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS Paul Doyle and Hong Huaqing 1 ... PaulDoyle is an ... more ... EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS Paul Doyle and Hong Huaqing 1 ... PaulDoyle is an Assistant Professor with the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. ...
This project seeks to conduct an investigation and evaluation of the pedagogical approaches adopt... more This project seeks to conduct an investigation and evaluation of the pedagogical approaches adopted in the acquisition of English language literacy for low-waged, low-skilled adult learners of English in Singapore. The research focuses on the pedagogical approach undertaken in the curriculum and training programmes that have been delivered under Singapore's Workplace Literacy Programme through the approved Workplace Literacy Training Providers, and further determines the pedagogical approaches which would be most effective in enabling low-waged and low-skilled adult learners to acquire English literacy and meet programme outcomes.
The three groups identified in this project are found to have developed different Mandarin oral p... more The three groups identified in this project are found to have developed different Mandarin oral proficiencies in relation to their different exposures of language use at home in terms of their vocabulary coverage and code-switching. The CSF group has a much bigger ...
ABSTRACT: Colloquial Singapore English is an outer-circle variety that exhibits contact-induced l... more ABSTRACT: Colloquial Singapore English is an outer-circle variety that exhibits contact-induced lin-guistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, we address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the extent to which the diglossia is reducible to register variation. We investigate the usage pattern of two linguistic variables which have acquired novel grammatical meanings, and show that our data support the Singapore English diglossia, but the variation is greater than what is normal in register variation. The diglossia of which one variant is an outer-circle variety does not reduce easily to register variation. INTRODUCTION1 It is generally accepted in the scholarly literature that the English language in Singapore comprises two major varieties, the vernacular variety called Colloquial Singapore English, and the formal variety called Stan...
Well-aligned parallel texts are an excellent source of information for contrastive linguistic and... more Well-aligned parallel texts are an excellent source of information for contrastive linguistic and translation studies. There already exist quite a few alignment tools and parallel text concordancers, but the aligners found in the literature mostly work towards an automated alignment of words or sentences in a restrictive or ideal domain and context (Barlow 1995;
and volunteer faculty and students from Brigham Young University Wed Pre-conference workshop: Usi... more and volunteer faculty and students from Brigham Young University Wed Pre-conference workshop: Using R for Corpus Linguistics (4188 JFSB) 12:00 Retrieving corpus-linguistic data from corpora with R (Stefan Th. Gries) 4:30 Statistically analyzing data with R (Harald Baayen) Thurs 8:30 Welcome
Aristotle (Cooper 1960) defined rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering all the available me... more Aristotle (Cooper 1960) defined rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given situation. " The use of rhetoric in advertisements is universal just because of its strongly persuasive strengths. The use of rhetoric in a monolingual advertising context has been investigated by some researchers (Angela Goddard 1998; Phillips 2002; McQuarrie 1996; Leigh 1994; Lagerwerf 2005) while the contrast of rhetoric use in a bilingual/multilingual context has received relatively less attention (Villalobos 2004), and the comparative analysis regarding the use of repetition of sound, word and phrase is rarely seen. To probe into this issue with a corpus linguistics approach, based on the data from our ongoing project of a parallel corpus of English and Chinese advertisements in Singapore print media, this paper adopts McQuarrie and Mick's taxonomy (McQuarrie 1996) to investigate how different types of rhetorical figures are used in this corp...
As a mirror of present-day China, Chinese neologisms on new media are useful not only for linguis... more As a mirror of present-day China, Chinese neologisms on new media are useful not only for linguistic analysis but also for teaching advanced learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Through analysing the word-formation mechanisms or strategies of Chinese neologisms on new media, learners can not only reinforce their understanding about the unique linguistic features of the Chinese language that they acquired before but also obtain a better understanding of the social and cultural soil that nurtures and shapes the Chinese language and its development. Using a small corpus that consists of authentic usage samples of 50 neologisms originated from Chinese new media, we attempt to explain how information about neologism formation strategies can be utilized in teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language.
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