Day #138 — Silly little things called collocations S01 E04
We can generally assume that writing is an acquired skill, even in our first language. Linguist John McWhorter asserts in his Ted talk that if human existence were represented in a day, writing was born in the last 45 minutes of that 24-hour period. It’s something we need to work at constantly, in order to avoid rust from setting in.
Relaying a message through text demands knowledge of conventions that identify the type of text and raises expectations about its message. These conventions are broadly defined into two large groups known as genre and register. The first prescribes the format and style the writer uses while the second outlines the level of formality or informality embedded in that message.
So, regardless of the learning goal: prepping students in elementary or middle school to write an argumentative essay, coaching high schoolers to draft a cover letter for college admissions, lecturing university students on the do’s and don’ts of an academic dissertation, applying process-based writing techniques to train students of other nationalities to write in English, training foreign candidates to sit international exams as part of their application to an English-speaking university, we inevitably deal with genre and register in writing classes.
That’s where the trouble sets in:
Running a check on the collocations found in texts attributed to register X or Y — for example — magazine, fiction, TV and media — reveals that the words that co-occur more than frequently are not restricted to one register in particular. The reader’s expectations are defined by their (un)familiarity with the genre in question. If the expectations are met, the text flows, resulting in what we call good writing.
What we can conclude from no register holds unique language features — they all overlap. Proof of this being in a corpus search I ran on the first two sentences of a blog post. By typing subsequent pairs of words and checking for the frequency of each combination in a million words across different registers, we can see how overlapping language is:
What happens when we ask students to write according to the predetermined models of text that are supposed to represent these genres, we end up applying rules and conventions that shape their production of language. This production often falls far from what is produced in the real world. One hypothesis is that the models we provide in formal education for textual production offer an organized but limited view of language use. Using corpus tools and concordancers are capable of broadening that view, enabling students to communicate beyond the walls of the classroom.
That is why I would love to have teachers’ take on the following questions.
- How do we prepare students to become good writers?
- At what point(s) do good writing in a school context and good writing in the real world converge and diverge?
- Would you consider using corpora (and other computer-based tools used to collect text electronically) in your teaching?
Originally published at http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com on May 18, 2020.
