Analysis of a Medical Research Corpus: A Prelude for Learners, Teachers, Readers and Beyond

By Georgette Nicolas Jabbour

Users of a non-native language studying and writing about higher levels of science, the humanities, and other disciplines will find this textbook an indispensable guide to communicating and learning.

Georgette Nicolas Jabbour, a longtime teacher of linguistics and researcher, weaves traditional methods of teaching a language with new technology – all of which is applicable to a multitude of languages.

Whether you are interested in languages in general, writing research, teaching the English language, teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, or Teaching English for Specific Purposes, you will find guidance in this book.

The author focuses on two main areas. The first several chapters present the context of the evolution of theories of language learning and teaching, of language and technology, and of the discourse of science. The second part of the book highlights the application of corpus linguistics tools such as extracting word frequencies, concordances, and collocations that develop better awareness in reading and writing.

Whether you’re a teacher, a student, or someone who simply wants to learn more about corpus linguistics, and improve your specific language skills in communication and word choices, you’ll find this a valuable resource.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480891753

Georgette Nicolas Jabbour

Georgette Nicolas Jabbour, a teacher and researcher before retiring as Associate Professor at the DLI Language Teaching Center, where she taught Arabic and trained multilingual teachers at the institute Professional Development Department, and at the Curriculum Development Department. She formerly taught at Damascus University, Department of English, teaching graduate medical doctors how to publish articles in English – an experience that led her to earn an English Applied Linguistics doctoral degree herself. She is the author of numerous articles on teaching languages and linguistics and has presented her findings at many university sponsored conferences.

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Copyright © 2020 Georgette Nicolas Jabbour.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of nonfiction. It is originally a doctoral dissertation in English Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, that has been adjusted and adapted in order to be more personal and more focused on teachers.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-9176-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9174-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9175-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020913494

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/17/2020

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 The Medical Research Article: A Preview for Readers

Chapter 2 Science and Language Technology

Chapter 3 Language Teaching and Training: The Rationale

Chapter 4 Corpus-based Reading

Chapter 5 The Discourse of Science: Focus on Arguments

Chapter 6 Design and Description of the Corpus

Chapter 7 Word Frequency, Concordance, and Collocation

Chapter 8 Theoretical Foundations for the Analysis of the MRA Sections

Chapter 9 Example Analysis of Ten MRA Articles

Chapter 10 Corpora for Teaching

Chapter 11 Context and Collocation

Chapter 12 Concluding Remarks: The Rhetoric of Science

Wise Saying

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or

eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Henry Ford

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This work is dedicated to all the esteemed colleagues, and

to all the students who I had the pleasure of meeting in the

course of my teaching career, be it for collaborating, teaching

or training. I recognize how, entirely, they represented a source

of support, inspiration, motivation, and encouragement.

ABBREVIATIONS

USED IN THE TEXT

MRA: Medical Research Article

MRAs: Medical Research Articles

A: Abstract

IMRD: Introduction, Methods, Research, Discussion

ESL: English to Speakers of other Languages

ESP: English for Specific/Scientific Purposes

PREFACE

This is a book for people interested in languages in general, and in aspects of reading and writing science, such as reading science texts and writing research. The domains of English Language Teaching, teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and Teaching English for Science and vocational purposes present a great value at the present time in the world using all types of technology tool applications. The technology I am referring to is that of using corpus linguistics (corpora plural of corpus) to study, analyze, and learn from a comprehensive analysis of science texts in terms of reading, writing, and communicating with a specific learned community.

The technology associated with corpus linguistics explained in this book is applicable to a multitude of languages that have a strong technology buildup similar to that of English. One area of linguistics which has developed very rapidly in the last twenty-five years is the idea of frequency in a language depending on text type using computer tools. Corpus study has shown that phraseology is the distribution of recurrent multi-word sequences in different text-types. As a result, the use of computer corpora is tending to become a mainstream methodology. The terms corpus linguistics and computational linguistics denote the use of computers to study and analyze language, together with the frequency of phraseology in a specific language. However, while the outcome of corpus linguistics is geared toward language teaching, computational linguistics deals with statistical information about language in order to create language models, such as computer programs for language testing and assessment.

University conferences include corpus linguistics topics we deal with in this book, such as corpora and language teaching, and some of the following topics: genre and register variation, morphology, semantics and syntax, discourse and pragmatics, parallel concordances, language history and language teaching. The first symposium in the US to address the newly developing branch of corpus linguistics was sponsored by a university English Language Institute at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, other applied linguistics departments started to introduce studies related to corpus linguistics of interest to studies of applied linguistics and to teachers of languages in order to see how language is used today, and how language differs if used in different textual contexts, enabling language teaching to be more effective. The vital proposal is that language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field in its natural context and with minimal experimental-interference. As a summary, corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora, representing samples of real-world text. As a last word in this section, a limited number of educational institutes and departments use corpus linguistics as a possibility for teaching as a fundamental approach to languages.

The interest in offering this work for publication is to explain a method of using corpus research in order to propagate a larger picture of the business of language teaching, language analysis, and language associated with journal articles publications, and textbooks. As soon as I started assembling my own corpus of medical research articles (MRAs) and using a concordance package, my understanding of the texts associating the conventional way of reading with concordance lines from texts raised awareness of language build up and possibly language frequencies in similar text types. Certainly, the use of technology products in language teaching is not new. The earlier use of technology formed a limited progress of language teaching as in voice recordings that helped essentially in teaching pronunciation, but at the present time with advances in the technology of text analysis the business of language teaching is greatly affected.

Corpora studies are based on compiling texts in a computerized, machine-readable form. The running of specific software provides lexical statistics about the texts under scrutiny which might not be possible to know precisely unless texts are computerized. Information about number of words, their frequencies, entries, collocations and concordances, about number of sentences and sentence length, about text density and about number of letters in words have all become possible in this new era of corpora studies. All such information can help understand the texts better, and assist at looking at similarities between texts, hence intertextuality, or reading across texts.

The increasing interest in looking at languages in terms of lexis, hence the term lexical approach to teaching, implies that words get their meanings from their combinations with other words. There is a tendency to look at words in the context of their occurrence. When the meaning of a word is shaded by other words that occur in its environment, there is a case of delexicalisation. Delexicalisation is a feature of idiomaticity and fixedness in language. High frequency words on a frequency list, because of the high range of their collocates, may become de-lexicalized. Collocations or word combinations have specific functions in the discourse, and should therefore become an objective in teaching. Information about number of words, their frequencies, entries, collocations and concordances, about number of sentences and sentence length, about text density and about number of letters in words have all become possible in this new era of corpora studies. All such information can help understand the texts better, and assist at looking at similarities between texts, hence intertextuality, or reading across texts.

The work in this book is divided into two areas. One area, chapters one to five, presents the context of the evolution of theories of language learning and teaching, of language and technology, and of the discourse of science. Theories of language teaching and learning are diverse, and their experiments were diverse as well for their own growth and applications. The grammar translation theory has been active since the earliest times. This theory is limited to theories underlying translation studies at the present time. Other theories ensued such as second language acquisition, constructive-developmental theory based on the learner individual experiences, situated learning theory, learning through experience, and transformative learning theory based on critical self-reflecting. The interest in technology applications started to be active around the eighties of last century when computers became available. In linguistics, studies researching the way a language can be analyzed and taught through machines started to be active. This has given way to computer-assisted instruction seen to be more inclined to favor a student-centered approach, focusing on learning more than instruction. This important date marks the interest in studies related to psychology, and technology-enhanced language learning. One decade later witnessed the surge of the real experimentation with language studies using computers. Dictionaries is a point in case. Before the advent of computers, dictionaries were prepared manually. As a computational tool, the machines became resourceful for compiling texts. The term discourse has also developed from its reference to the spoken language solely as in political speeches, church sermons and the like, to its reference to any unit of connected speech or writing longer than a sentence. Four traditional modes of discourse have been specified as narration, description, exposition, and argumentation.

The second area of the book deals with the application of corpus linguistics tools such as extracting word frequencies, concordances, and collocations that develop better awareness in reading and writing. Frequencies, concordances, and collocations are terms borrowed from many instances of language studies that used to be manually performed as in Bible studies. A word list is essential in corpus linguistics because it usually provides the mathematical number a frequent word has been used in a text, not only grammar words, but other content words representative of the text. A concordance is the alphabetic presentation of the frequent words in a text in a specific computer technique. Concordance is a term that has been found useful in studying a large amount of language held on the computer. Language held on a computer is referred to as a corpus. A corpus can be compiled from general texts, as in stories, or from specific texts as the medical research articles as this research depicts. Collocation is a term used to specify the word combinations that appear before or after a search word. All these tools are usually available in what is what we call concordance software.

The milestones of the use of computers for studies related to the English language are research projects in lexical development, used for the preparation of English language dictionaries, and reference books, including dictionaries of idioms, reference grammars, as well as English teaching textbooks. Language in use, not made up by linguists to fit a grammar rule, has become the mantra for teaching and learning a language. The present work opens the door to using corpora for teaching and also for awareness raising of general language readers and writers of science texts readers.

The outcomes of lexical studies have emphasized the value of the independent lexical item, be it a single word or a multi-word item, referred to sometimes as phraseology, its immediate environment, and the meaning it projects, rather than the grammatical structure in which it occurs. These recent studies make use of computer software to analyze chunks of authentic language found in a wide variety of text types: newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, letters, memos, and so on. If we consider the language classroom as a place to analyze texts and formulate text models, we should be able to use such linguistic corpora and current software packages, e.g., concordance tool, to study the language we impart to second language learners. Tracing the use of words and word combinations in texts would enhance the quality and quantity of text models we formulate

It is with the inception of this phenomena of lexical studies using corpora that a new trend of looking at language had started and continues to affect the way people look at language for reading, learning, teaching, and raising language awareness. In this book, we offer the reader samples of real language used in the medical research articles, a specialized corpus of English for science used in the twentieth century, depending on a number of medical research articles.

The interest in this work is that the language of science may be different to a certain extent from language used for everyday communication, even from the language used in conference presentations. Therefore, a preview of the evolution of this type of language has been provided. The intercommunication between writers, prospective readers and writers, and editors and publishers display intertextuality, a relationship between texts.

Throughout this writing, we build the argument that language teaching, and language reading and writing any language, is connected with texts, mainly written although oral language has also been included in some experiments. The ability of an educated adults in training is to recognize the type of text they are reading, writing or listening to. This ability is useful for basic designs that meet the language needs for people learning the language, or improving their linguistics ability to make their voices better understood in speech and writing. The ultimate example we provide is that of the medical research article, since knowledge of medical issues is a common issue for not only individuals, but also governments and health policies. This type of language for the sake of teaching, is represented in high frequency words, in grammar structures, and specific research words, all indicative of the level of a text.

In previous times studying a medical text for example was only looking at specific linguistic elements in the text and making limited generalizations about the intent of the text, sometimes inaccurate, and lacking credibility. When corpora started off at the end of the last century, text analysis has become richer because of the larger patterns of language available for study, more indicative of authors intents, and more significant place in the authoring communities, be it in professional or general journals or in daily publications. In the study of corpora, consideration of semantic networks incorporated in the study of prepositions and research words, and text organization built on using text characteristics, such as tense either for the representation of an argument supporting research or for refuting it. The analysis presented in this book shows that present tense is related to the writer’s domain in a text, while language patterns that use other tenses in the same text relate to other writers’ ideas, referred to as attributions. Therefore, the book provides timely information since it is the use of technology together with specific verifiable frameworks of language use to teaching. The book uses the technology of texts analysis, mainly science texts for teaching reading, writing, and oral use in language seminars, conferences, and the like. It is meant to be for students working on an English as a second language.

Corpora commonly subsumed under the title of corpus linguistics led very clearly to the study of discourse, and definitely to a critical and interactive study of language for research and teaching. The basic tenet of such an advent is the possibility to make interesting hypotheses about language use by investigating large amounts of language held on the computer, and ways to present language in the classroom. Many scholars have used such knowledge to write reference textbooks for teachers, using their own assembled corpus or using an already made available corpus. Corpus-related resources and activities make use of corpora in studies of syntax, morphology, phonology, discourse, pragmatics, cognition, child language, interaction, sociocultural function, historical linguistics, and lexicography, among others. Teachers and researchers can make use of corpora that are freely available on specific sites for linguistic analysis, classroom activities, and materials development.

This book provides background information on the process of publishing a medical research article. When prestigious science journals offer articles for a global community, we should know that these writers are constrained in the way their articles must be written by editors’ imposition of instructions and directions. This is a point that is typically absent in language teaching courses until the time when corpora studies provided insights about why writers of medical research write the way they do, and sometimes are restricted from being published.

The first chapter is a preview of research articles since they form the core of the research at hand. Chapters one to five encompass the theories of teaching reading in general, science texts included. Chapter two deals with science and technology. Chapter three presents the rationale of corpus teaching. Chapter four deals with models of reading available in the literature that science texts also use in their delivery of information. Chapter five focuses on comparing how the language of arguments was presented in earlier times, by contrast to the present time. Writers of science research texts present their research based on the knowledge that well-known authors have offered in their written achievements by superscripting them.

The application of corpus linguistics starts with chapter six which is about the design of the corpus, followed by word frequencies, concordances and collocations available in chapter seven. Chapter eight presents the analysis of the MRA sections. Chapter nine is about mapping frequency and discourse, that is, using the top-down information encompassing rhetoric and discourse, and the bottom-up linguistic elements. Chapter ten covers the important areas readers need to assess in a research text. Chapter eleven presents common collocations essential in the construction of a medical research text. Chapter twelve concludes with a note on reading science, and a note on how corpus linguistics applications can help in recognizing the truth value of statements used by health officers regarding the dynamics of the occurrence of medical problems.

The book is encyclopedic in the sense that it provides many aspects of language for interested researchers, readers and teachers, while providing teachers with the essential tendencies of language in sciences. The book should be considered as the activation of knowledge for the specialized reader, and the foregrounding of methodological possibilities for the diversification in teaching, including computerized learning, and online learning.

The main trend in this writing is that readers go through extracts of texts as they appeared in the journals that formed the corpus. The idea is to present specific structures and their frequencies, used for specific meanings in the corpus. In case readers have the opportunity using software for text/corpus linguistics, such as Conc (for Macintosh) and WordSmith Tools (for Windows), they can read collocations of specific words in contexts used in scientific texts, and available online on their computers. They can make use of the knowledge of how words, and word combinations, provide specific meanings for specific contexts.

The cited scholars named in the body of the text and in the References have been ones of the earliest scholars who discussed