Chao Han and Sheena Gardner have recently had their third article based on transition markers in the Han CH-EN corpus accepted for publication in JEAP. The Han CH-EN corpus is a subset of the BAWE corpus in which each text by a Chinese speaking Chinese educated student is closely matched by genre, discipline and level of study to a text by a UK English speaking student. The corpus is available to other researchers in CLAC and could be investigated for numerous purposes. Sheena Gardner is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Coventry University, and together with Professor Hilary Nesi supervised Chao Han’s thesis. Chao Han completed his PhD at Coventry in 2018 and is now a lecturer in English at Lanzhou University in China.
The three papers that investigate transition markers in the Han CH=EN corpus are:
Han, C., & Gardner, S. (2021). However and other transitions in the Han CH-EN corpus. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 51, May 2021, 100984. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.100984.
Gardner, S. & C. Han. (2018) Transitions of Contrast in Chinese and English University Student Writing. Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice (an online open access journal) in a special issue on ‘Metadiscourse in native and foreign language academic texts’ 18 (4). 861–882. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1202135
Han, C., & Gardner, S. “How can I add an argument appropriately in English?” Addition Markers in Chinese L1 and English L1 University Student Writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2023. https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S1475-1585(23)00118-2
The abstract of this third paper is:
Previous studies have shown that as L2 writing develops from intermediate to advanced levels, addition is marked less often and the use of and decreases as the use of moreover, furthermore and other less frequent addition markers increases. This study goes further in that it examines first how addition is marked in different academic disciplines and genres, and secondly how addition markers and their collocates are used by Chinese students in comparison to L1 writers of English. For the first question, and in contrast to Peacock’s (2010) analysis of research articles, addition markers are used more in this student writing in the sciences of Engineering, Food Sciences and Biology than in the social sciences of Business and Law, and more in the more scientific writing of lab report genres than the discursive writing of essays. Such variation reinforces the importance of genre and discipline differences in teaching second language writing. For the second question, a qualitative analysis reveals the important difference between stringing several points using addition markers and grouping points into one argument using a shell noun, or reinforcing one argument with collocates. These findings lead to specific suggestions for L2 academic writing teachers.