City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Degree Forum
Building of academic discourses in university students’ writing
Presented by
Miss PUN Fung Kan
PhD candidate, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong
Date: 10 Nov 2009, Tuesday
Time: 4:30 - 5:30pm
Venue: B7603 (7/F, Blue Zone), Academic Building, CityU
Abstract
This paper focuses on investigating the possible development of university students’ writing ability in academic discourse in English. Following the substantial literatures dealing with the patterns of language choice typical of academic discourse of English, a list of linguistics features was compiled and applied on measuring students’ academic writing potential. The linguistic features located at lexicogrammatical level are objective and measurable, covering language formality, language complexity, and objectivity. Comparisons on the occurrences of the linguistic features are made in two major directions, across the successive assignments of Biology students, and across the disciplines of Biology and Linguistics of exploring and recommending texts. The comparison on the linguistic features in the successive draft of students’ written assignment shows that students have demonstrated improvement across versions and assignments in terms of grammatical accuracy, and slight improvement in the achievement on producing academic writing.
Speaker
Miss PUN Fung Kan is currently a joint-U PhD student at the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics in the City University of Hong Kong and the Department of Linguistics in the University of Sydney under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Webster and Professor James Martin. Her research interests include functional grammar, text analysis, second language development, forensic language, and corpus linguistics.
~ CTL Staff and Research Degree Students only ~
