The general theoretical framework of writing development employed in this study has been the threefold (simple to complex, spoken to written and inaccurate to accurate) typology suggested by Shaw and Liu (1998), as introduced in Chapter Two. In discussion of the findings, the evidence is broadly considered from these three positions of writing progression from simple to complex, from spoken to written and from inaccurate to accurate. These general categories which also form the subheadings for description and comment on the findings have been useful in framing conceptions of writing development throughout the study. They do overlap to certain extent, for example it is possible, to refer to a feature such
as increased word length as an example of increased complexity and of being more characteristic of written than oral production. As will be seen, the talk to writing strand is easier to support by empirical evidence as it can be explicitly referenced to research and is presented first in section 6.3. The simple to complex perspective, which is discussed in section 6.4, is more difficult to directly evidence, not least because the category may bear an assumption that simple is inferior and complex is superior, a consideration which may not be true in all cases. The following example shows the first four sentences from an initial essay with the shortness of the sentences suggesting a degree of simplicity, however there is use of the present perfect.
(15 week student 2012 pre)
I come from China. I have been in my country for twenty four years. And the UK is my favourite country. I learn this two countries well.
In addition, the grammar of academic writing is often said to be ‘simple’ at clause level (Halliday, 1985). Take this example from an article in Journal of Neuroscience and where the complexity lies in the noun phrases.
To reconcile these results, Warren et al hypothesised that different neuronal ensembles encode operant reward and extinction memories (Warren et al., 2016).
Another example could be the use of nominalisation which is certainly more characteristic of writing than speech (Biber et al., 1999, p.589) and nominalised writing is a feature of
academic prose (Biber and Gray, 2013) but it could also be said to mark an increase in complexity. The two strands, therefore of simple to complex and spoken to written can be viewed as offering a degree of complementarity which can accommodate the differing metrices and feature focus used by the Coh-Metrix and the MAT programmes. For this reason, the emphasis in this chapter is upon the empirical evidence for student development along the talk to writing stand, which as will be seen covers most of the observed changes in linguistic characteristics identified by the research instruments.
The general observation needs also to be made that there were in fact very few areas of direct contradiction between the findings of Coh-Metrix and MAT but because the specific indices are often different, it may be necessary to make comment on the complementarity or otherwise of the results. One issue which arises is related to the scope of the two techniques, with Coh-Metrix being a composite programme which is designed primarily to measure textual cohesion and so contains measures which are often applicable beyond word or phrase level. The MAT programme by contrast is concerned with specific parts of speech and the dimensional aspects are a separate component. As a result, it is often not possible to make direct correlations between for example, syntactic complexity at sentence level and to relate the findings to each other. This can cause problems when attempting to establish congruence and areas of agreement or disagreement between the two research tools. For example, the MAT focus on specific language items such as emphatics (e.g. really, most, more, for sure) and amplifiers (extremely, absolutely, very, totally) represents one clear difference from the codification system of Coh-Metrix (discussed in Chapter Four) and as a result, the linguistic emphasis differs somewhat. There are features such as word length and agentless passives incidence which are recorded by both programmes and there are many overlaps which may present a congruence between the two and a characterisation of the two approaches might emphasise the stress on cohesion in Coh–Metrix and the identification of specific linguistic
features by MAT.
A closer look, however at the principal components of MAT can partially address this issue, with descriptive (1) connectives (6) syntactic pattern density (9) and word information (10) components (approximately 40 descriptive elements) relatively easy to match with MAT categories. The two main research instruments, Coh-Metrix and MAT could therefore be described as providing complementary but not exactly matching analyses of the corpus data. In other words, they offer different areas of focus, occasionally identical but often different in several aspects. The establishment of areas where they are both in broad agreement is the main emphasis of this section.
The tables used (6.2 to 6.8) are for illustrative purposes and use aggregated figures for all programmes with detailed course by course results suggested for reference in Chapters four and five. In order to compare the results of the Coh-Metrix and MAT programmes, simple percentage figures are used which are rounded up to the nearest whole number. The pair information in Table 6.1 serves to illustrate this:
Table 6.1 EAPCORP Matching pairs per course
Programme number of matching pairs 20 week 2010 9 15 week 2010 27 10 week 2010 57 6 week 2010 35 Total 128 20 week 2012 8
15 week 2012 26 10 week 2012 65 6 week 2012 36
Total 135
overall total 263
Score range for each year 2010 maximum +128 minimum -128 2012 maximum +135 minimum -135
A 2010 score of + 72 indicates that scores increased for 72/128/256 = +78% of pairs A 2010 score of -72 indicates that scores decreased for 72/128/256= -78% of pairs