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A Combined Corpus and Systemic‐Functional Analysis of the Problem‐Solution Pattern in a Student and Professional Corpus of Technical Writing
Author(s) -
FLOWERDEW LYNNE
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3588401
Subject(s) - corpus linguistics , systemic functional linguistics , linguistics , sociology , psychology , mathematics education , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy
This article reports on research describing similarities and differences between expert and novice writing in the problem‐solution pattern, a frequent rhetorical pattern of technical academic writing. A corpus of undergraduate student writing and one containing professional writing consisted of 80 and 60 recommendation reports, respectively, with each corpus totaling approximately 250,000 words. Drawing on two analytic perspectives, the methodology included searches for key words that provided linguistic evidence for the problem‐solution pattern. A more delicate examination of the linguistic meanings encoded in the problem‐solution reports involved a systemic‐functional approach to analysis of evaluative texts, APPRAISAL (Martin, 2000, in press), as well as an analysis of the lexicogrammatical patterning of the key word problem within a framework of causal relations. Along with many similarities between the expert and the novice writing, findings highlight important differences in the use of problem within the causal relation patterns. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

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