Students

Seda Acıkara Eickhoff is a fourth-year Ph.D. student and an employee at the Center for International Education. Her research interests are learner corpus research, L2 writing, academic and professional writing, and pragmatics. 

Exploring the effect of target-language extramural activities on students’ written production 

Collaborators: Henrik Kaatari (University of Gävle), Tove Larsson, Ying Wang (Karlstad University), Pia Sundqvist (University of Oslo)

Extramural English (English learning activities outside the classroom) is known to contribute positively to learners' reading, vocabulary, and speaking skills (Sundqvist, 2009; 2019); however, little is known about its impact on the writing skill. With an attempt to fill this gap, this study investigates how extramural English activities impact learners' lexical diversity and grammatical complexity. 

Elizabeth Hanks

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

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

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.

Instructor feedback across registers: Variation between written and screencast feedback 

Collaborators: Elizaveta Kuznetsova, Cassidy Christenson, Dilara Dikilitas, Grant Eckstein (Brigham Young University), Kate Matthews (Brigham Young University)

Instructor feedback is one of the most important contributors to student achievement in a learning environment, yet providing effective feedback is extremely challenging for instructors (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Recently, teachers and scholars have begun exploring the capacity of screencast video feedback to alleviate some of its challenges as well as to improve the overall quality of feedback and the experience of giving or receiving it. Screencast feedback is provided by teachers recording a video of themselves discussing a student’s paper in line with an electronic version of the student’s essay on screen. This modality of feedback differs from traditional written comments because the written feedback is typically provided on the margin of students’ essays through either handwritten or electronic means. This project explores variation between written and screencast feedback through various stages, including compiling the Writing Feedback Corpus (WFC), examining the prevalence of feedback types (i.e., addressing higher-order and lower-order concerns), and investigating the patterns of hedging across registers. 

The Contracts Word List: A business-English resource developed through corpus analysis

Collaborators: Brett Hashimoto (Brigham Young University) and Jesse Egbert

English learners regularly cite vocabulary as one of their greatest hurdles to achieving advanced language proficiency (Ma, 2009). Word lists such as the academic word list (Coxhead, 2000), medical academic word list (Wang et al., 2008), and the basic engineering list (Ward, 2009) have aided learners in acquiring specialized vocabulary. However, there is yet no contracts word list, despite the fact that millions of people who use English as a lingua franca rely on contracts to conduct business (Anesa, 2019). This study develops the first word list of American English contracts by compiling a corpus (The Corpus of English Language Contracts) and identifying its most prevalent distinctive and generalizable words and multi-word units (The Contracts Word List).

Anne Stoughton is in the third year of her PhD studies. Her interests are speech and listening, and she is interested in corpus linguistics from an SLA and pedagogical perspective. Her work to date in corpus linguistics has concentrated on comparing frequency-based versus text-dispersed methods for identifying keywords in podcasts and analyzing if podcasts can be conversational using Biber’s multi-dimensional analysis.

Anne is currently a teaching assistant for the Story of English and has worked as an instructor teaching English to college-aged and adult English learners at both Coconino Community College, the Program in Intensive English at NAU, and ELS Center in Illinois. She has also taught first year composition at NAU and at Northern Illinois University. 

Nur Yağmur Demir is a second-year Ph.D. student at NAU. She received her BA (Boğaziçi University – 2016) and MA (Middle East Technical University – 2021) in English Language Education in Turkey. She has several years of experience in teaching English and Turkish in EFL contexts. She currently works as a composition instructor at NAU. She is interested in analyzing computer-mediated communication, pragmatics, English as Lingua Franca and register with a corpus linguistics perspective. 

The Use and Functions of the Pragmatic Marker You Know in Professional ELF Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study

This ongoing project investigates the impact of social variables on the use of the pragmatic marker “you know” in professional ELF spoken discourse. While ELF has been studied linguistically, research on its connection with social variables is limited. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, analyzing “you know” in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to explore its functions. Preliminary findings suggest 'you know' primarily serves as a textual/discourse organizer, with no significant link to power relations.

Exploring Linguistic Characteristics of Online ELF Registers: A Corpus-based Analysis of Informational Blogs and Interactive Discussions

This study aims to expand the ELF and register variation literature by investigating online written ELF registers with a corpus linguistics approach. Two sub-corpora of Written English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings corpus (WrELFA) are analyzed: informational (academic) blogs and the interactive discussions that take place under these blogs. The main goal is to explore the inherit linguistic characteristics of online registers produced by ELF users.

Dilara Dikilitas joined the Applied Linguistics Ph.D. program at NAU in 2023. She received her M.A. in TESL-Applied Linguistics from NAU and B.A. in TEFL from the Middle East Technical University. Currently, she teaches English Composition classes at NAU. Her research interests include World Englishes; linguistic discrimination; and issues of inequity, particularly in spoken modality. 

An Investigation of Pause Location in Spoken English Corpora

This corpus-based study investigates the pause behavior of speakers of three L1 backgrounds from two English-spoken corpora: The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and The Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC). Descriptive statistics and binomial logistic regression were used for analysis. The study answers two research questions: (1) In what ways do L1 speakers of English, French, and Spanish differ in terms of the location and type of pause produced in English interviews? (2) Does L1 background and/or presence vs. absence of a clause boundary have an effect on what type of pause (silent vs. filled) is produced? The results show that the L1 Spanish group differed considerably from the other groups with regard to both frequency and location of pauses. Additionally, both L1 and the presence of a clause boundary were found to be predictors of pause type. 

Politeness in Instructors’ Feedback: Does the modality matter?

This corpus-based study intends to contribute to the newly emerging area of research, features of teachers’ feedback to students through the lens of politeness and impoliteness. The study examined teachers’ use of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Pearson, 1988) and impoliteness strategies (Culpeper, 2010) in two feedback modalities: screencast and written, focusing on the impact of feedback modality on the type of strategies. Three instructors’ feedback comments on 20 students’ essays were taken from the Writing Feedback Corpus (WFC) and coded for politeness and impoliteness strategy. 

Kelly Kendro is a first-year PhD student who uses existing and ad-hoc language corpora to investigate language variation, including internet-mediated language change.

Extralinguistic markers of political affiliation: A corpus analysis of Parler and Twitter

Poster presented at AAAL 2023; manuscript in preparation

Collaborators: Scott Jarvis (NAU), Abby Almas (University of Utah)

In spoken language, speakers may signal in-group affiliation through vocal cues such as intonation or phonemic variation. In written online discourse, these cues are unavailable by virtue of the medium; they may instead be approximated through extralinguistic style markers including non-standard usage of capitalization, punctuation, or emoji. Text-based interactions on social media have been identified as potential areas of interest for researchers aiming to study the manifestation of these patterns. This project investigates whether non-standard capitalization is one such indicator of political affiliation in social media posts. We use corpus data from Twitter and Parler to compare the frequency of non-standard capitalization as well as the nature of those words. We ask two research questions, namely: i) do the frequency of non-canonical capitalization significantly differ between the corpora, and ii) are there patterns in which words were capitalized (i.e., political or ideological words)? 

Internet-influenced shifts in compound word formation and usage frequency

Poster presented at HDLS 15

Collaborators: Scott Jarvis (NAU)

Most empirical work investigating how the internet has influenced and affected language is constrained to novel tools for linguistic analysis and concerns about how abbreviations, acronyms, and other common characteristics of “textspeak” may be detrimental to language knowledge and production, particularly in younger speakers. However, an understudied intersection of internet and language development is the adoption of new words into the common lexicon. In this study, we track and compare the emergence and standardization of new words both pre-Internet and in the Internet era. In English, compound words historically follow a typical progression during development and usage, wherein a two-word phrase begins functioning as a single lexical item, which may present as a hyphenated word before ultimately emerging as a single-word compound. Though there are some exceptions or variations to this pattern, it can largely be identified through analyses of historical corpora. We use the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to investigate how emergence during the Internet era differed from pre-Internet word emergence. Specifically, we ask whether there are era-based differences in: i) form frequency such that newer words do not follow the historical orthographic sequence, and ii) how quickly words become widely-used.

Cansu Avci is currently a second-year MA student at NAU. She earned her bachelor’s degree in ELT with a minor in European Studies from Middle East Technical University (ODTU) in 2021. She teaches English Composition classes at NAU. Her research interests are learner corpora, L2 writing,  English for Academic Purposes. 

The use of hedging devices in teachers’ written feedback across task types

This corpus study extends previous research (e.g., Hyland & Hyland, 2001; Sperling, 1994) by analyzing the hedging devices present in written feedback provided by composition teachers across different task types (e.g., Research Literacy Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis, Persuasive Essay, Career Readiness Essay), using the Written Feedback Corpus. Analyzing these devices in teachers’ feedback in different task types, which are the common subjects taught in composition courses to improve students writing skills, enhance our understanding of how/if writing instructors adapt their feedback to the requirements of different tasks, potentially improving their feedback practices in composition courses in higher education. Antconc was used to identify these devices following Hyland and Hyland’s (2001) framework. The findings  offer valuable insights for teachers wishing to work on improving their written feedback to soften criticism, offering suggestions, and fostering a positive learning environment.

Alexander Holmberg is currently a second-year MA student at NAU. He received his BA in English in 2019 from Western Oregon University. He has been teaching English in various ESL/EFL scenarios since 2017. His research interests include ESL/EFL writing, data-driven learning, English for Academic Purposes, and learner corpora. 

Writing Across Levels: A Corpus Study of Student Writing

Vocabulary acquisition is essential to language learning, but deciding which vocabulary to teach and exclude can be complicated. Additionally, many successful writing techniques can be overlooked in an ESL setting, like using hedges in academic writing. This study examines similar academic writing by first-year and fourth-year international students at Western Oregon University and compares them with fourth-year domestic students using the MICUSP corpus. Areas of comparison were the use of hedge words from Aull (2019) and various vocabulary lists from AntWordProfiler. Data from the results can be used to improve ESL/EFL classroom techniques and activities. 

Nathaniel Seres is a first-year MA Student in Applied Linguistics. He received his bachelor's from Kent State University, and spent some time abroad teaching in Japan. His research interests include corpus linguistics, fossilization/attrition, and second language acquisition.

Olivia Wilson is currently a senior completing her BA in English, as well as a first-year MA student, at NAU. She has been tutoring ESL/EFL at NAU's Program of Intensive English and tutoring writing for the Lumberjack Writing Center. Her research interests include analyzing forensic linguistics in pragmatics and corpora; differences, similarities, and effectiveness of English L2 on-line or in-person instruction; and combining psychology and applied linguistics.