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In:Corpus-based Research in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honor of Doug Biber
Edited by Viviana Cortes and Eniko Csomay
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 66] 2015
► pp. 1–24

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A corpus-based analysis of linguistic variation in teacher and student presentations in university settings

Published online: 14 January 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.66.01cso
This study investigates patterns of language use in professional presentations by teachers and students in a university setting. A 271,500 word corpus was compiled using 122 teacher presentation segments extracted from a previously collected large corpus of classroom discourse and 69 student presentations recorded at a student research symposium and transcribed. Student and teacher presentations were compared based on the dimensions of linguistic variation in university settings (Biber & Conrad 2009). Findings show that while presenting, teachers use significantly more features associated with oral and content-focused discourse as well as more teacher stance features. In contrast, students, use more features of literate and procedural discourse with no stance features. Keywords: Multi-dimensional analysis; spoken academic corpus; participant language use
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