Context-Informed Corpus Linguistic Analysis of FY Writing

Abstract

A historical look at first-year (FY) writing illustrates its importance in access to higher education. It also shows how FY writing has been commonly conceptualized in rhetoric-composition research and pedagogy: as whole texts in particular contexts. How FY writing appears through a more linguistic lens—as constituted by shared, language-level features across many contexts—is a different question. That question is more easily answered via corpus linguistic analysis, a method that is predictably rare in studies of FY writing given the conceptual focus of rhetoric-composition. Yet another question is how FY writing might appear if we combined the two conceptualizations and approached FY writing as both whole text enactments in contexts and as patterns of discourse across them.