Dear list members,

I am delighted to announce a new publication in the Elements in Corpus Linguistics series, by Lee McCallum and Philip Durrant. The Element title is: “Shaping Writing Grades: Collocation and Writing Context Effects”. It explores relationships between collocations, writing quality and learner and contextual variables in a first-year university composition programme.

The Element can be viewed here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/search?q=9781009074445&_csrf=Bx66KnU6-7EI4dZitpR-VaoXeKEnaDIDIrHY. It will be available free of charge for 2 weeks. The full Element abstract can be seen at the bottom of this email.

This publication brings the number of Elements in this series to eight. The other titles in the series so far are:

Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures (Caple, Huan & Bednarek)

Doing Linguistics with a Corpus (Egbert, Larsson & Biber)

Citations in Interdisciplinary Research Articles (Muguiro)

Conducting Sentiment Analysis (Lei & Liu)

Natural Language Processing for Corpus Linguistics (Dunn)

The Impact of Everyday Language Change on the Practices of Visual Artists (Hocking)

Analysis Language, Sex and Age in a Corpus of Patient Feedback (Baker & Brookes)

Best wishes

Susan Hunston (Series Editor)

Abstract

This Element explores relationships between collocations, writing quality, and learner and contextual variables in a first-year composition (FYC) programme. Comprising three studies, the Element is anchored in understanding phraseological complexity and its sub-constructs of sophistication and diversity. First, the authors look at sophistication through association measures. They tap into how these measures may tell us different types of information about collocation via a cluster analysis. Selected measures from this clustering are used in a cumulative links model to establish relationships between these measures, measures of diversity and measures of task, the language background of the writer and individual writer variation, and writing quality scores. A third qualitative study of the statistically significant predictors helps understand how writers use collocations and why they might be favoured or downgraded by raters. This Element concludes by considering the implications of this modelling for assessment.

Professor Susan Hunston (she/her)

Department of English Language and Linguistics

University of Birmingham

Birmingham B15 2TT

(+44) 0121 414 5675

s.e.hunston@bham.ac.uk