Randi Reppen

The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English (LANA-CASE)

Collaborators at NAU: Randi Reppen, Jesse Egbert, Tove Larsson, Doug Biber, Lizzy Hanks

Collaborators at Lancaster University: Tony McEnery, Paul Baker, Vaclav Brezina, Gavin Brookes, Isobelle Clarke, Raffaella Bottini

The goal of this project is to compile a comparable American English counterpart to the widely known Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al., 2017). While there are several spoken corpora that represent specific subsets of the United States population, this corpus will be the first publicly available, large-scale corpus that represents general conversational American English. More details are available on our website and Twitter, @LANA_corpus.

Exploring grammatical complexity from the register perspective: Theoretical and applied studies

Main researcher: Doug Biber

Collaborator(s): Randi Reppen (NAU); Jesse Egbert (NAU); Shelley Staples (U of Az); Bethany Gray (Iowa State U);

In a series of studies over the last several years, we have been investigating how the grammatical complexities of spoken and written registers differ (synchronically and diachronically), and exploring the applied implications of those linguistic patterns of variation. Those implications relate to both the study of student writing development as well as the study of the challenges that students face trying to comprehend academic written discourse. In current research, we are synthesizing the results of these studies over the last 10 years, developing a coherent theoretical and empirical framework for the description of grammatical complexity within both theoretical and applied linguistics.

Staples, S., Biber, D., & Reppen, R. 2018. Using Corpus-Based Register Analysis to Explore Authenticity of High-Stakes Language Exams: A Register Comparison of TOEFL iBT and Disciplinary Writing Tasks. The Modern Language Journal 102(2): 310-332.

Exploring the longitudinal development of grammatical complexity in the disciplinary writing of L2-English university students. Forthcoming. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research. Doug Biber, Randi Reppen, Shelley Staples, Jesse Egbert