I Don’t Know I Mean ….Stance Bundles in Student Discussions

MacDiarmid, C. (2018) I Don’t Know I Mean ….Stance Bundles in Student Discussions. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse, St. Andrews, UK, 24 Feb 2018.

Abstract

Lexical bundles (i.e. recurrent fixed strings of words) have been identified as a significant component of a wide range of registers, including academic spoken and written genres and speech events (e.g., Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber et al., 2004a; Chen & Baker, 2010; Cortes, 2004; Durrant, 2015). These studies include discussions of stance bundles which are used to include both attitude and degrees of commitment. Although spoken academic registers have been considered in relation to large corpora (e.g. TK2-SWAL, Biber et al., 2004b), little is known about student-centred disciplinary-specific learning events. This talk will illustrate how 3- and 4- word lexical stance bundles are used in a specialized corpus of disciplinary-specific student talk. The specific corpus is of medical-genetic postgraduate students engaging in problem-based learning, a student-centered approach to exploring scenarios and developing skills and knowledge relevant to the profession. I will outline the procedure for identifying these bundles, briefly compare the distribution of stance bundles to other discourse functions, and then show how these bundles are used. I will comment on how the stance bundles reflect the type of speech event, in this case group discussions compared to student reports, along with the specific communicative aims. Of particular interest to EAP teachers may be the types of bundles used to support collaborative group efforts.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: MacDiarmid, Dr Carole
• Authors: MacDiarmid, C.
• Subjects: L Education > L Education (General)
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > Language Centre