Lily Lewis, National Defense University, Washington, DC, USA

Introduction

Most of us in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) are not subject matter experts in the disciplines our students study. With little first-hand disciplinary knowledge, how can we decide what to emphasize in teaching disciplinary writing? We can certainly ask our students about their writing needs, but EAP students often have little or no experience writing in English in their chosen discipline. We might also try collaborating with other academic departments, but this is not always feasible.

My research aims to supplement existing knowledge of disciplinary writing by analyzing the characteristics of successful student writing in various academic disciplines. Understanding verb tense/aspect (hereafter “TA”) is critical because students need to make decisions about TA in nearly every sentence, and errors in TA can obscure meaning and reduce cohesion, thereby negatively impacting evaluations of student writing (Hinkel, 2001).

Previous studies in corpus linguistics have provided a strong foundation for understanding the use of TA. An analysis of tensed verbs in published academic writing (Biber et al., 2021) found that simple (unmarked) aspect is used in more than 90% of all verb phrases, perfect aspect is more frequent than progressive aspect, and perfect progressive aspect is quite rare. A study of student placement and diagnostic essays (Hinkel, 2004) suggests that present tense is more frequent than past, and past tense is more frequent than future.

Much of the previous research on TA in student writing has been limited in scope (only one discipline or genre), level (only first-year writing), and/or size (small number of texts). Furthermore, nearly all prior studies have analyzed tense and aspect separately, without providing data on all 12 possible TA combinations (see Table 1). Future is labeled as a tense here, as is common in EAP materials, though linguists typically do not consider it a tense.

Table 1

TA combinations in English.

The Study

My research questions are as follows:

1) Which TA combinations are most frequent in successful student writing?

2) How does TA usage vary by academic discipline?

Corpus and Disciplines Used

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) (Römer & O’Donnell, 2011) is a great resource for students, teachers, and researchers. The corpus consists of papers written by final-year undergraduates and graduate students from years one to three, representing different academic disciplines and including both L1 and L2 English speakers. All of the papers were written for the student's credit-bearing courses, and each received an “A” grade. One could argue that getting an A is not the only marker of a successful paper, and grammatical accuracy is probably not the most important factor in determining the grade. Nonetheless, these “A” papers can serve as models of successful upper-level writing in various academic disciplines.

For this study, I limited my analysis to the 11 disciplines in MICUSP studied by at least 1% of U.S. international students, according to the U.S. Open Doors Report (Institute for International Education, 2021). These disciplines are: biology, civil and environmental engineering, economics, education, industrial and operations engineering, mechanical engineering, nursing, physics, political science, psychology, and sociology. This results in a total of 544 papers and 1,495,645 words.

Corpus Searches

I tagged the corpus with CLAWS7, a program that automatically labels the part of speech for each word. Once all of the texts had been tagged, I loaded them into Sketch Engine, a powerful corpus analysis tool known for its word sketch and advanced search features. I used Sketch Engine’s Corpus Query Language (CQL) concordance function to write searches for each of the 12 TA combinations. Table 2 gives an example of the search for future progressive, with a gloss to explain each item.

Table 2

CQL search for future progressive

Tagging the data and writing CQL searches permits analysis of large datasets with a high degree of accuracy (88% of search results were accurate, and only 3% of TA combinations were not picked up by searches and, therefore, not counted).

Findings

The goal of this research was to determine the most frequent TA combinations in successful student writing and to explore how this usage varies in different disciplines. The results of the analyses are as follows:

1. Present simple is by far the most frequent TA combination, followed by past simple, present perfect, future simple, and present progressive. 

The seven other TA combinations are used in less than 1% of all tensed verb phrases, as seen in Table 3. TA combinations that incorporate future tense and/or perfect progressive aspect are among the least frequent choices. There are no instances of future perfect progressive in the corpus.

Table 3

Frequency and percentage of use for TA combinations totaled across all 11 disciplines.