Transcript

MAGGIE CHARLES

It’s very often held that there’s no such thing as general academic writing; you can’t teach general academic writing. Whereas my view is that, in reality, that’s what a lot of people have to teach, so we better find some ways of doing it.

And, in my view, one of the ways of doing it is to use that disciplinary variety in a very creative way, by getting students to explain what’s happening in their own field to someone who is in a different field.

It even works well ... In the second class, we had two people working together who were working in the same field, but even that works well because they found, for example, that they had estimated the frequency of ‘we’ as different. So, then, they checked it against their own corpus data, and I think they found that one of them made a better estimate than the other.

I suppose what I want them to do is that I want them to go away knowing something and able to do something which they either didn’t know before, thought they knew and have now discovered is not quite the case, and they need a take-home message which is quite clear and which is relevant to them and their thesis and their writing. They appreciate a corpus because it gives them this access to multiple, multiple examples.

One student from a few years ago puts every research article she reads straight into the corpus. So the last time I checked with her, she had over 400 articles in it – this is going to be quite a big corpus. And she said to me, when I asked her why, she said to me, ‘I’m more confident if I see 2000 hits than 20 hits.’ From the end of this course, they go away with their own corpus.

One of my major themes in getting them to build their own corpus is that they should be more autonomous; that they can be more independent learners. What we want to do is, essentially, make ourselves redundant. By the time they have done a year with me, or even if they’ve only done one term with me, if it’s this term, they will go away with something that is theirs – they can adapt it, they can grow it, they can use it whenever they want to, but they have the basis of the tool and the knowledge. And I think that really aids independent learning.

Certainly, a lot of the students that I get, I don’t think have ever thought of language as an object of study, and especially not as an object of study which can be carried out by computers. Okay. So, that, they tend to think of language as something that ‘Oh gosh, you’ve just got to go and learn it.’ Okay. Well, actually, you can take some shortcuts to discover what it would make sense to learn and the computer can help you do that.

So, that, one of the things that is particularly relevant for our students is that looking at the scrutinising of evidence – this, first of all, collection of evidence, which is your data, which is your corpus – then scrutinising it, analysing it, and drawing conclusions from it is exactly what we expect them to do, certainly when they are doing a research degree and probably also at third-year undergraduate level.