Benet VincentCoventry University | CU · School of Humanities
Benet Vincent
PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics
About
26
Publications
3,984
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73
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Benet Vincent currently works at the School of Humanities, Coventry University. Benet does research in Corpus Linguistics and English Language Teaching. His current projects are 'Communicating Covid', 'A Clockwork Orange in translation', and BAWE Quicklinks
Additional affiliations
November 2013 - present
Publications
Publications (26)
A Clockwork Orange is notable in both its original textual and adapted cinematic forms for its linguistic invention. Both versions prominently feature ‘Nadsat’, an invented anti-language through which the narrator and protagonist Alex conveys his story and communicates with others, including the reader. Drawing on our past research in the field, ‘N...
Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novella A Clockwork Orange is one of the most popular speculative works of fiction of all time, having been translated over fifty times into more than thirty different languages, as well as being adapted for stage, and filmed cinematically on at least three occasions.
Burgess's work is a first-person narrative, presented in t...
The importance of gaining a better understanding of phraseology as a key lexicogrammatical phenomenon has been recognised for some time now in the area of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). A well-established approach is to use corpus software to extract lists of potentially useful phraseological phenomena from a corpus; see e.g., Ackermann and C...
Different countries have seen greatly contrasting outcomes in their responses to the current pandemic. A particularly stark contrast can be seen between island nations on opposite sides of the world – the UK and Australia / New Zealand, a comparison that does not reflect well on the UK’s response to the crisis. It is interesting to consider the ext...
The idea of using concordances to help students with their writing has existed since the dawn of data-driven learning (DDL) and Tim Johns’ kibbitzers. A number of studies have explored students’ use of concordances in feedback (e.g. Gaskell & Cobb 2004; Quinn 2015), typically reporting enthusiasm for the approach and increased linguistic awareness....
Although the idea that corpora offer great potential for language learning has existed at least since Johns (1986), this potential has yet to be fully realised in mainstream teaching. The lack of take-up is as true for academic writing as it is in other areas of language learning.
One obstacle to the pedagogic use of corpora may be the apparent co...
Presentation on initial findings in our ‘Communicating Covid’ project. We have been looking at the ways that Government spokespeople gave instructions to the public during Covid briefings held in the first lockdown (March-June 2020). This work focuses on whether the widespread confusion reported about understanding of lockdown rules might be linked...
Anthony Burgess’s novella A Clockwork Orange has been translated over fifty times into approximately thirty different languages. A unique feature of the novella is its anti-language, Nadsat. Nadsat poses stylistic and creative challenges for translators, being composed of different categories which draw on different word-formation principles. Build...
The importance for writers of negotiating reader relationships is by now well-established; this is a particularly delicate area for students who are of course writing for a higher status audience. One aspect of this is the expression of obligation, which up to now has not received a great deal of attention. This study seeks to address this issue by...
Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novella A Clockwork Orange is one of the most popular speculative works of fiction of all time, having been translated over fifty times into more than thirty different languages. Each translator of this work is faced with the challenge of adapting Burgess’ invented anti-language, Nadsat, into their target language. Some transl...
Presentation on the latest developments in the BAWE Quicklinks project (http://bawequicklinks.coventry.domains/). This project is creating a database of hyperlinks to corpus outputs (concordances, collocation lists, wordsketches) from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus using the online interface Sketch Engine.
A perennial issue in EAP teaching is the extent to which feedback on writing is effective (or indeed whether it is effective), and thus exploring new ways of providing feedback to students is an important endeavour within the field (Maas 2017). The issue from a practitioner perspective is how to assess the effectiveness of formative feedback in lea...
This paper outlines a new initiative aimed at integrating concordances and other corpus outputs into written feedback for learners of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Although data-driven learning has by now a 30-year history, it has yet to have a great impact on mainstream pedagogy despite various claims regarding its efficacy and its benefits...
A Clockwork Orange is notable in both its original textual and adapted cinematic forms for its linguistic invention. Both versions prominently feature ‘Nadsat’, an invented anti-language through which the narrator and protagonist Alex conveys his story and communicates with others.
However, since the earliest publication of the novel, infamously w...
Now best known as a novelist and composer, Anthony Burgess began his career as a language teacher, philologist and translator. Fluent in many languages, Burgess used his linguistic knowledge to enrich his fiction with portmanteau terms evoking multiple languages. The best known of these works is A Clockwork Orange with its created language, Nadsat,...
The expression of obligation in student academic writing
Recent years have seen a growing focus on the expression of interpersonal meaning in academic prose as in other registers. However, while studies in this area typically mention obligation in passing, it remains generally overlooked. This is a problem for learners and teachers of academic Eng...
This presentation is about an initiative aimed at International students studying at Coventry University to highlight written errors and stylistic issues we commonly encounter. Our way of addressing these is by creating screencasts indicating common issues and how to avoid them. The underlying principles, format of screencasts and use of corpora in...
Although lexical bundles (LBs) have attracted considerable attention in applied linguistics, their
variation by discipline is an under-researched area, particularly with regard to Master’s dissertations. This paper explores the frequency, structure, and function of four-word bundles used in Electrical and Electronic Engineering Master’s dissertatio...
This is a talk introducing the BAWE Quicklinks project. This is an initiative we are starting at Coventry University to create links to concordances which have been created to help students address issues they have in their writing. The links (to the open access BAWE corpus on Sketch Engine) are provided as part of feedback on written tasks. They a...
Home-made corpora are a useful source of highly discipline-specific language data. They enable EAP practitioners not only to find out more about disciplinary practice in their own contexts, but also to create bespoke materials and activities for learners with specific communicative needs. The process of collecting and preparing corpus data is often...
The 1962 dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange achieved global cultural resonance when it was adapted for the cinema by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. However, its author Anthony Burgess insisted that the novel’s innovative element was the introduction of ‘Nadsat’, an art language he created for his protagonist Alex and his violent gang of droogs. This co...
This study demonstrates an approach based on findings from phraseology which can be used to identify potentially useful phrases in a text by starting with continuous or discontinuous sequences of very frequent words. These combinations are then searched in a corpus of academic texts to find their common collocates and ascertain whether the particul...
Projects
Projects (4)
The impact of COVID-19 on the English language has already been noted in the new words and phrases that have become familiar to us (e.g. flatten the curve; see Oxford English Corpus Blog), and dozens of studies have sprung up (more than 15 in the Book of Abstracts for the 2020 Corpus and Discourse conference) that examine the spread of information about COVID in different countries and from different linguistic perspectives. This project aims to investigate a specific UK perspective by considering how the ideas and advice related to the pandemic are conveyed to different audiences.
The Downing Street Briefings became a daily event in the UK during lockdown, watched by millions and widely reported. They present a government minister, typically flanked by medical experts, and accompanied by data slides. The format of the Briefings has become conventionalised, starting with a government view, followed by data from the slides and medical comment, concluding with questions from the public and from journalists. The purpose of the Briefings is to update the public on the latest data and the government regulations and guidelines, but they also serve to highlight areas of public concern.
The Briefings themselves present a range of perspectives (government policy, medical expertise, journalistic concern) which are worthy of investigation and which are shaping our appreciation of the pandemic.
Our project seeks to understand how these messages were conveyed, for example by investigating instructions given to the public about what they should or shouldn't do during the pandemic in 2020.
The goal of my project is to explore the use of a number of different linguistic features used in the field of electrical and electronic engineering in order to create ESP/EAP teaching materials. English language instructors can use these findings to inform their language teaching program at the Masters' dissertation writing level.
