
Sheena GardnerCoventry University | CU · School of Humanities
Sheena Gardner
MA, PhD, Dip TEFL
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July 2011 - August 2015
Publications
Publications (69)
A frequent comment by academic writing tutors is ‘use more citation’, yet this may not be helpful. University students may have difficulty with citation practices for several reasons. Prior to university, students may be encouraged to develop arguments based on personal opinions. At university, the risks of plagiarism are emphasised. Finally, stude...
English as a Lingua Franca is emerging in Indonesia, but it is not a well-documented variety. This paper aims to describe the pronunciation features of Indonesian-Accented English (IAE). Fifty educated Indonesians who were regular users of English were recorded reading two texts. The phonological features of consonants, clusters, and vowels were in...
The importance of language to changing public behaviours is acknowledged in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. A key means of achieving these changes is through the use of directive speech acts, yet this area is currently under-researched. This study investigates the use of directives in the 2020 COVID-19 briefings of four leaders of...
To complement earlier studies of writing development in the BAWE corpus of successful student writing ( Nesi & Gardner 2012 ; Staples et al. 2016 ), we examine the Systemic Functional Linguistics notion of Theme as used by L2 writers across first- and third-year and in two distinctive discourse types: persuasive/argumentative Discursive writing of...
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...
Research on the frequency of transitions, or transition markers, has led to contested claims. Comparisons by L1 speaker (e.g. Lei 2012, Leedham 2015) argue that Chinese writers overuse and underuse certain transitions when compared to L1 English writers. Moreover, Biber et al. (1999) suggest transitions are frequent in technical scientific writing,...
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...
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.
Following an exploration of engineering programmes in higher education, and a review of literature on engineering registers, genres and disciplines, this paper asks if there is a register for engineering. Word frequencies, n-grams and frequent n-grams in context were analysed in a 7.3 million word corpus created from four sections (Introduction, Ma...
With advances in corpus‐informed descriptions of patterns in English grammar, research has revealed a wealth of detailed, specific, and meaningful form–meaning mappings and frequency information that provide teachers with attested examples of items with similar grammatical patterns and similar meanings. Starting from a discourse‐ or genre‐based app...
One of the fundamental ways in which knowledge develops is through contrast. This applies not only to the development of ideas and theories in argumentative texts, but also to the contrasting of new findings with old in experimental reports. Contrast, then, is central to the development of academic knowledge. A common finding in contrastive analyse...
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...
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...
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...
Conditional sentences are made of two clauses namely “if-clause” and “main clause”. Conditionals have been noted by scholars and grammarians as a difficult area of English for both teachers and learners. The two clauses of conditional sentences and their form, tense and meaning could be considered the main difficulty of conditional sentences. In ad...
The expansion of the Hong Kong university curriculum from three to four years starting 2012 has created new spaces where students can develop their academic literacies. These new spaces extend across disciplines, through reading and writing requirements, into general education courses and into specific courses in the disciplines. Underpinning each...
This chapter on role play and dialogue in early childhood contexts focuses on studies of sociodramatic play, where children pretend in verbal interaction with others, that include analysis of the discourse. The combination of reproduced roles and fictional play provides insights on children’s developing language and understandings of the world thro...
“English is an assemblage of varieties of different kinds … never in a state of being, always in a process of becoming … while Chaucer is almost out of range, Shakespeare is not” (Matthiesson 2014: xv). As social worlds change, we interact in different ways, and new meanings are construed through new wordings. Few could have imagined the exponentia...
This chapter on role play and dialogue in early childhood contexts focuses on studies of sociodramatic play, where children pretend in verbal interaction with others, that include analysis of the discourse. The combination of reproduced roles and fictional play provides insights on children’s developing language and understandings of the world thro...
This paper introduces five linked resources and demonstrates, with a focus on
Business, Economics and Engineering, their use in a novel genre-instantiation
approach to teaching academic writing. The resources centre on the British
Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. They are: (1) published research literature
that investigates the student assig...
Conducting research into young learner experiences of school poses methodological challenges which are compounded when, as is increasingly the case, the classroom interaction is multilingual and the research methods are participatory. Each new or adapted method sheds further light on the issues that can arise. Researcher-initiated role play is a me...
Extended abstracts from the 2013 European Conference of Systemic Functional Linguistics
When students write Case Study assignments at university, they face the demands of
the academy and of the profession. This paper explores the choices successful students
of Business and Medicine make to meet these competing demands at the levels of
genre, register and language. In Case Study genres individual cases, such as a specific
company or a...
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...
Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemic functional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacy practices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describes how an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British Academic Writte...
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...
Changes in the role and nature of metalanguage used in schools, brought about by the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1988), instigated this paper, which investigates teacher representations of language in relation to assessment contexts. Drawing on Freeman (1994) we analyse not only what is represented in the teachers' use of metalanguage, but al...
With examples from junior science lessons on magnets, Gibbons (1998, 2001a, 2002) argues that Teacher-Guided Reporting (TGR) is a familiar teaching stage with potential for the development of academic registers when there is linguistic task sequencing, significant student initiation, and press on linguistic resources. In exploring the potential of...
CD-ROM affordances are explored in this article through participation in classroom interaction. CD-ROMs for shared reading of animated stories and language work were introduced to all Malaysian primary schools in 2003 for the Year 1 English Literacy Hour. We present classroom interaction extracts that show how the same CD-ROMs offer different affor...
Recent studies suggest that focus-on-form (FonF) instruction has a positive effect on the second language proficiency of young learners. However, few have looked at learner perspectives on different FonF tasks, particularly in those young learners. This study investigates children's attitudes towards four FonF task-types in three Primary 5 English...
This article aims first to show how a teacher, working within a nationally proscriptive, standards-driven, mainstream context turns a form-focused phonics practice activity into a word game that engages the imagination, intellect, and identity of 5–6-year-old English language learners. Based on the assumption that teacher—student interactions are c...
Our research aims to describe genres of assessed writing at British universities (ESRC RES-000-23-0800). To this end we have developed a corpus of 2800 texts from four years of study across four broad disciplinary groupings. Our research design integrates a corpus linguistic account of formal features in the corpus with an ethnographic investigatio...
In the context of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) project, which aims to characterize student writing across 28 disciplines and four years of study, this chapter focuses on describing what university students write about, or ideational meaning. It focuses on Field, for example on whether students write about people, ideas or scientific...
Despite the potential benefits of partnership teaching, as distinct from collaborative teaching and support teaching, evidence from the Midlands and West of England suggests that full partnership teaching between a class teacher and language support teacher of English as an Additional Language is rare, though collaboration is increasing. Occasional...
Request a copy from https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/0e0ed097-fbda-4e1b-bb63-90807479a838/1/
Factors such as increases in student numbers and technological developments are threatening the luxury of one-on-one tutorials and bringing changes in modes of academic discourse. This small scale exploratory study identifies characteristics of taped oral, compared to written, feedback that are attributable to its spoken nature (longer, less dense)...
In this paper I take Gibbons' notion of Teacher Guided Reporting (TGR) and explore whether the features she identifies as being crucial in a science lesson with 9-10 year olds also are found in a literacy lesson with 5-6 year olds. The findings support Gibbons' claims for linguistic sequencing of tasks, degree of student initiations and role of tea...
This article explores the nature of formative assessment in a primary (elementary) language learning context. The research is situated in nine inner-city schools where an Early Years Intervention Project is being implemented to address problems of low levels of achievement in English, with specific reference to the language support of learners for...
Studies of the use of English around the world take a variety of forms, but most take a narrow view of language that excludes personal names and thus fail to gain the fuller perspective that names provide. This study draws upon descriptions of the use· of English in Botswana and a recent questionnaire study of personal names and shows parallels bet...
This study examines the relationship between individual variables and ESL progress among nine Kurdish and seven Bosnian immigrants. All participants are adult refugees who arrived in Canada with virtually no English. Significant correlations are found between the dependent variables of oral and written progress and the independent variables of lite...
The paper reports on an exploratory study of the acquisition of specific content vocabulary, discourse connectives and grammatical knowledge over time by instructed adult L2 learners. A major objective of the study was the development of an appropriate methodology and instruments for classroom research on these questions. The study followed 37 inte...
The paper reports on an exploratory study of the acquisition of specific content vocabulary, discourse connectives and grammatical knowledge over time by instructed adult L2 learners. A major objective of the study was the development of an appropriate methodology and instruments for classroom research on these questions. The study followed 37 inte...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of St Andrews, 1984.
One major aim of this ESRC funded project (RES-000-23-0800) is to complement the BASE corpus of spoken academic English by developing a British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of student-written assignments from across the disciplines and years of university study. The second major aim is to describe the genres of assessed writing through di...
This paper aims to explain the classification developed for all 2858 texts in the BAWE corpus as members of thirteen genre families identified for assessed university student writing. An understanding of this genre classification provides a broad overview of types of university writing, and assists teachers and researchers to use the BAWE corpus ef...