Hilary Nesi

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Coventry University

An overview of types of corpora relevant to ESP, their content and design, and their pedagogical uses.

This study used an online correction task to explore the extent to which different types of warning notes in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online were heeded when users tried to correct errors in the use of L2 target words. The task was completed by 332 participants, yielding 1,819 answers produced after clicking on links to relevant e...

A definitive guide to the long tradition of lexicography, this handbook is a rigorous and systematic overview of the field and its recent developments. Featuring key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning and developing research in the field, this one-volume reference provides both a survey of current research an...

A number of studies have examined the occurrence of stories in lecture contexts, and have suggested that stories can encourage student engagement and the acquisition and retention of lecture information content. Some of these studies have analysed story structures in terms of Labov and Waletzky’s model (1967) or the more elaborate model developed b...

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...

Although a great deal has been written about citation in expert research writing, and about novice students’ acquisition of citation skills for the purposes of argumentation, little is known about the typical uses of citation in undergraduate student coursework, in different disciplines, and at different levels of study. This paper describes how ty...

Community archives are often viewed as repositories of knowledge and experience that are nevertheless somehow remote from the taxpayers who often fund them. However, the idea of an archive has more recently been popularized by digital resources that allow access to established archives and also permit users to create archives of their own. This boo...

This article investigates differences in evaluative style in introductions to research articles written by scholars from China and Britain. A corpus of 30 research article introductions in applied linguistics was analysed in terms of Appraisal Theory and genre analysis, using the UAM Corpus Tool. Findings from this analysis suggest that both the Ch...

This short chapter shows how discipline and genre affect the use of phrasal and clausal features in university student writing. Recognition of the different phrasal and clausal complexity requirements of different types of student assignment could make a big difference to the way writing at this level is taught.

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.

This paper explores the way academics from two different cultural backgrounds engage with their discourse community in published international research articles. The Introduction and Conclusion sections of 30 research articles in the field of applied linguistics were analysed in terms of the Engagement system within Appraisal Theory (Martin & White...

The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who...

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...

Chinese business education differs from British business education in many respects. On the whole, it focuses on the acquisition of theoretical knowledge, whereas British business education places far more emphasis on soft management skills and team-work. This paper examines a split-site business degree program offered by a Chinese international sc...

We have created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) about dictionaries and dictionary-making, to be hosted by FutureLearn. This paper discusses the design and development of this course, which is pitched at high school and undergraduate level participants as well as language enthusiasts around the world. The MOOC will answer questions such as: how...

The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (www.coventry.ac.uk/BAWE) comprises almost 3,000 pieces of university student writing distributed across four domains (Arts & Humanities, Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences) and four levels of study (from first year undergraduate to taught masters level). The texts had all been submi...

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...

While there have been many investigations of academic genres, and of the linguistic features of academic discourse, few studies have explored how these interact across a range of university student writing situations. To counter misconceptions that have arisen regarding student writing, this paper aims to provide comprehensive linguistic descriptio...

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...

This paper develops a new framework to examine the use of ‘evaluation resources’ in research discourse. In previous studies of evaluative resources, two distinct, although interwoven, types of context have been identified: 1) the real world where evaluation resources are used to describe situations, and 2) the research world studying the real world...

This paper reports on a linguistic analysis of request emails written in English by young Business English (BE) graduates working in trading companies in China. The emails were extracted from a corpus of 307 messages (34,837 words) between these graduates and their clients around the world, mostly in countries where English is only used as a Lingua...

In a new multidimensional analysis of the British Academic Written English corpus, four new factors were identified (Gardner, Nesi & Biber, under review), to be treated as dimensions along which the BAWE registers can be situated. Two of these four new dimensions depend strongly on stance features and distinguish between BAWE texts grouped by disci...

This paper compares British and Chinese research articles published in international journals in the field of applied linguistics. introductions and conclusions in 30 research articles were compared; half were written by British scholars, and half were written (in English) by Mainland Chinese scholars. Stance and voice, two crucial aspects of argum...

This paper provides an overview of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and reports on two multidimensional analyses of the corpus, focusing on the findings relating to informational production and density. The most highly informational texts were found in the Social Sciences, at Master’s level and in the final year of undergraduate s...

This book provides a guide to the most significant contours in the geography of the lexicographical world, as well as offering series of eye-witness accounts of the major issues confronting lexicographers and the users of dictionaries today. Part I considers the synchronic dictionary, and especially three characteristic types: (1) the dictionary fo...

This paper presents the case for compiling small, manually-sampled corpora, rich in contextual information, for research, teaching and learning in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Large datasets such as the British National Corpus, more recent web-derived corpora, and the web itself are major sources of i...

The conventions for structuring research articles are relatively stable and are well-understood by members of the relevant research communities; research article introductions are almost always demarcated by section headings, for example, and typically consist of a series of moves aiming to create a ‘research space’ for the article to occupy. In ma...

This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language corpora. It takes as a case study the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC) which contains a selection of the letters held in the BT Archives, housed in Holborn Telephone Exchange. One of the essential differences between a corpus and an archive i...

This paper proposes an alternative to questionnaire surveys and other methods of investigating dictionary user expectations, wants and needs: the content analysis of dictionary-related queries on online general-purpose Q&A sites. Web postings are anonymous and are not associated with any particular institution or dictionary developer, so they tend...

http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/index.html

Most investigations of citation practices have concentrated on the output of published academic writers (for example Swales 1986, Hyland 1999, Okamura 2008 and Harwood 2009) or postgraduate research students (for example Thompson 2000, Charles 2006, Pecorari 2006 and Bloch 2010). Borg (2000), and Harwood and Petric (2011) are amongst the very few p...

Research into dictionary use does not have a long history. Although publishers recognised in the 1960s that dictionaries should be designed with a special set of users in mind' (Householder 1967: 279) there were extremely few empirical user studies before the 1980s - Welker's most recent survey (2010) lists only six. The subsequent surge of interes...

Pilot Study Findings on behaviour of neologisms most used/created by young people in different dictionary types and in newspapers

Analysis of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus has revealed similarities and differences in student writing across disciplines, levels of study and `families' of genres that have implications for assessment practices across the academy. So far, however, findings from the corpus have only been published in papers addressing fellow co...

s demand for English-medium higher education continues to grow internationally and participation in higher education increases, the need for a better understanding of academic writing is pressing. Prior university wide taxonomies of student writing have relied on intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task prompts...

Full paper available from http://edipuglia.it/esp/esp2013/ The Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) is a growing corpus of English-medium lectures from across the world, currently including transcripts from Malaysia, New Zealand and the UK (www.coventry.ac.uk/elc). Unusually, the ELC encodes functions that recur across large numbers of transcripts, usi...

Most published e-dictionary research involves studies of the way e-dictionaries are used, surveys of the habits and attitudes of e-dictionary users, or accounts of the development of new experimental e-dictionaries. The e-dictionaries that are described in detail in this research tend to be the prestigious varieties emanating from university centre...

Dictionaries are tools which people use to access information about words.

One of the applications of corpus studies to English for specific purposes (ESP) has been the production of wordlists for materials and test design. A corpus needs to be large to represent a given language variety of text and many types of corpus analysis can be conducted if the corpus is annotated in some way, for example with part of speech tags...

Engineering lectures are delivered in the medium of English all around the world. Is the discourse of these lectures the same everywhere, or is it affected by context? This paper focuses on variation in lecturers’ use of summary. http://www.baal.org.uk/proceedings_2012.pdf

All proficient language users have implicit knowledge about register, word meaning and grammatical and lexical patterns. If this were not the case we would not be able to speak and write with any fluency. We often find it hard to explicate all that we intuitively know about language, however, and in any case we cannot always rely upon what we think...

This paper analyses laughter in spoken academic discourse, with the aim of discovering why lecturers provoke laughter in their lectures. A further purpose of the paper is to identify episodes in British data which may differ from those in other cultural contexts where other lecturing practices prevail, and thus to inform the design of study skills...

This study of writing by university students in the UK draws on one of the largest collections of student assignments ever made: the British Acadmeic Written English (BAWE) corpus. It introduces the surprising variety of genres used by students today, from traditional essays and lab reports to more exploratory genres such as narratives and reflecti...

This paper describes an approach to what we are calling the ‘pragmatic’ annotation of the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC). The ELC contains 70 English-medium engineering lectures from across the world, currently including Malaysia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Italy (www.coventry.ac.uk/elc). The lectures are in the form of videos, raw text...

Many inanimate abstract nouns can perform a cohesive function, facilitating the creation of succinct, coherent texts. Such nouns only have a vague general meaning when taken out of context, but acquire a more specific and often attitudinally marked meaning with reference to other words in the text, whether they be in the same clause or in a previou...

A number of dictionaries include numbered ‘signposts’ in polysemous dictionary entries. These may be placed in a ‘menu’ at the top of the entry, or distributed as ‘shortcuts’ before each meaning. This study compares the effect of three versions of entries for MED2 ‘red’ words (i.e. those of particular usefulness to learners): with their original me...

The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus was developed with ESRC funding as part of the project entitled 'An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British Higher Education' (2004-2007). The project aimed to identify the characteristics of proficient student writing, and to compare these across disciplines and levels of study. The...

This chapter aims to identify some important disciplinary differences at clause level in student assignments which have been awarded good grades, and have therefore met lecturers’ expectations, at least to some extent. Using keyword analysis, which is a corpus linguistic technique, followed by closer analysis of clause meanings in context, it consi...

The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus is a collection of texts produced by undergraduate and Master's students in a wide range of disciplines, for assessment as part of taught degree programmes undertaken in the UK. The majority of the contributors to the corpus are mother tongue speakers of English, but, in order to be included in the...

The term electronic dictionary can be used to refer to any data collection in the electronic form concerned with the spelling, meaning or use of words. Although this broad definition can be taken to include machine-readable databases used by language researchers, and glossaries, translators, and spell-checkers incorporated into educational or offic...

These three chapters are all concerned with the design of materials to help learners recognize and reproduce appropriate collocations. All identify problems with existing materials, all tentatively suggest improvements, and, in support of their conclusions, all report on findings from a variety of sources, such as corpus analysis, materials analysi...

Full paper available from https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/f9e913b7-c733-36e3-e63a-f819fe57e802/1/ This paper compares published writing produced by British and Sudanese medical researchers. Twenty research articles were examined, 10 by British and 10 by Sudanese writers. All had been published in highly regarded international journals. As e...

This paper describes the developmental process and design principles underpinning GrammarTalk, a set of computer-based self-access grammar materials. GrammarTalk was developed in response to findings from analysis of the writing errors produced by Chinese foundation year EAP students, from a review of SLA theory and existing print-based grammar tea...

This paper describes the investigation of a small corpus of writing in English for academic purposes produced by L1 speakers of Mandarin. The investigation involved the development of a tagset for the identification of formal errors in the corpus, and the subsequent analysis of these errors with a view to creating remedial grammar materials for Chi...

This paper will describe an ESP approach to the design and implementation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tasks for computer science students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and discuss the effectiveness of the chat feature of Windows NetMeeting as a tool for developing specified language skills. CMC tasks were set within a programme of...

Request a copy from https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/0e0ed097-fbda-4e1b-bb63-90807479a838/1/

This paper discusses some approaches to the categorisation of cohesive devices with reference to spoken academic discourse, multi-word units, and strings of frequently co-occurring words (lexical bundles). It goes on to investigate the cohesive role of lexical bundles in a corpus of 160 university lectures (120 from the BASE corpus and 40 from MICA...

This paper reports on a collaborative project, currently being carried out by the Centre for English Language Teacher Education and the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick, England, to compile a multimillion-word corpus of student writing. Since May 2001, we have collected samples of proficient written coursework produced by stud...

This paper compares Chinese and English small-group discussions using IRF theory. It discovers similarities and differences in the exchange pattern in terms of (1) the length of the turn (2) the complexity of the turn (3) the functions of the turn (4) the initiation of the exchange. Full text available at http://owww.brookes.ac.uk/schools/education...

In this paper the lexical environment of secondary school English language classrooms in Hong Kong and Guangzhou are compared. Teacher output for one week of first-form lessons was recorded in two representative schools. Lexical richness in terms of type-token ratio and word-type frequency was measured, the words that were explicitly taught were id...

This paper reports on an investigation into the dictionary‐using habits of international students studying in the medium of English at a British University. Over a period of three years, six groups of students were set assignments requiring them to report on the way they had consulted dictionaries to find the meanings of unknown words in tex...

Book InformationResearch on Dictionary Use in the Context of Foreign Language Learning. Focus on Reading Comprehension. Research on Dictionary Use in the Context of Foreign Language Learning. Focus on Reading Comprehension Yukio Tono Tübingen (Lexicographica. Series Maior 106.) Max Niemeyer Verlag 2001 257 By Yukio Tono. (Lexicographica. Series Mai...

This paper describes a project to develop an English spoken academic wordlist to complement the Academic Word List compiled by Coxhead in 1998. Syllabus designers consult learners' dictionaries when they are creating word lists for use in schools and colleges, and there is a fair degree of agreement at the most basic levels about which words are im...

This paper examines research findings concerning the density and speed of spoken discourse generally, in the light of evidence from the BASE corpus of authentic academic speech. A sample of lectures from this corpus is compared with texts used for lecture comprehension practice in EAP textbooks, and tentative conclusions are reached regarding the r...

This paper describes a multimedia materials development project for international students at English-medium universities. So far the project has involved the recording and analysis of over one hundred lectures and seminars. Our first CD-ROM, Listening to Lectures (Kelly, Nesi and Revell 2000) is unique in its use of genuine lecture footage, enabli...

This book reviews a range of possible approaches to the study of dictionary use, and reports on a series of five studies to explore different aspects of receptive and productive use by learners of English as a foreign language.

This report is in three parts. The first part lists the dictionary skills that might be taught at university level, the second part reports on the way these skills are actually being taught by informants at a range of universities in the UK and overseas, and the third part reports on my informants’ attitudes and beliefs relating to the teaching of...

A vision of the future of the electronic dictionary