Corpus Example: Using an Analytical Framework to Characterize First-Year Undergraduate Newspaper Article Writing

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter details the analysis of a corpus of 140 newspaper articles based on a single academic source text written by first-year undergraduate liberal education students. The analysis is both quantitative and representational, and qualitative and inductive. It is quantitative in the sense that data were produced about the number of times each strategy was employed. In a second, qualitative step, the way the student writers employ each strategy is determined and categorized. In the original analysis, all 34 strategies in the analytical framework were analyzed, but to keep this chapter readable, we only present the results for one strategy out of each theme: describing the method from Subject Matter, applied implications from Tailoring Information to the Reader, mention of statistics from Credibility, stance markers from Stance, and references to the reader from Engagement. To conclude this chapter, we discuss the general insights that can be drawn from this analysis and consider the use of the analytical framework in didactic settings.