5 Students’ views
In the next video clip, you’ll hear the views of three of Maggie’s students:
- Verena, a German speaker who is studying Economics
- Gabriele, who speaks both Italian and Portuguese as first languages and is a philosopher
- Li-Chia, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese and who is studying Archaeology.
Activity 3 Listening to three students’ views
Allow about 15 minutes
- As you listen, make notes on what each student says about the value in using a corpus.
- Why does Maggie think it’s difficult for EAL students to use first person pronouns in their writing?
Discussion
- The three students are all positive about using corpora to investigate academic writing in their subject areas. Verena is currently using her corpus of Economics articles to search for instances – or ‘hits’ - of the first person plural ‘we’. She shows us the different ways in which writers combine ‘we’ with other words in her English corpus and comments that in German it is unusual to use ‘I’ or ‘we’ in scientific writing. Gabriele describes corpus software as a good tool. He says he realises that he often translates from Italian or Portuguese into English, rather than writing directly into English. Finally, Li-Chia says she finds it useful to explore the writing of successful academics in order to learn from them.
- Maggie points out that English is a language that allows ‘I’ and ‘we’ in some disciplines whereas some students’ first languages may not allow this. The corpora may thus throw up surprising patterns for students.
OpenLearn - Language in professional life
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