This research note focuses on how corpus analysis tools can help researchers make sense of the data writing centers collect. Writing centers function, in many ways, like large data repositories; however, this data is under-analyzed. One example of data collected by writing centers is session notes, often collected after each consultation. The four institutions featured in this noteâ€"Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A&M University, and The Ohio State Universityâ€"have analyzed a subset of their session notes, over 44,000 session notes comprising around 2,000,000 words. By analyzing the session notes using tools such as Voyant, a web-based application for performing text analysis, writing center researchers can begin to explore critically their large data repositories to understand and establish evidence-based practice, as well as to shape external messaging about writing center laborâ€"separate from and in addition to impact on student writersâ€"to institutional administrators, state legislators, and other stakeholders.

Background: Current research in composition and writing studies is concerned with issues of writing program evaluation and how writing tasks and their sequences scaffold students toward learning outcomes. These issues are beginning to be addressed by writing analytics research, which can be useful for identifying recurring types of language in writing assignments and how those can inform task design and student outcomes. To address these issues, this study provides a three-step method of sequencing, comparison, and diagnosis to understand how specific writing tasks fit into a classroom sequence as well as compare to larger genres of writing outside of the immediate writing classroom environment. By doing so, we provide writing program administrators with tools for describing what skills students demonstrate in a sequence of writing tasks and diagnosing how these skills match with writing students will do in later contexts. Literature Review: Student writing that responds to classroom assignments can be understood as genres, insofar as they are constructed responses that exist in similar rhetorical situations and perform similar social actions. Previous work in corpus analysis has looked at these genres, which helps us as writing instructors understand what kind of constructed responses are required of students and to make those expectations explicit. Aull (2017) examined a corpus of first-year undergraduate writing assignments in two courses to create “sociocognitive profiles” of these assignments. We analyze student writing that responds to similar writing tasks, but use a different corpus method that allows us to understand the tasks in both local and global contexts. By doing so, we gain confidence and depth in our understanding of these tasks, analyze how they sequence together, and are able to compare argumentative writing across institutions and contexts. Research Questions: Two questions guided our study: What is the trajectory of skills targeted by the sequence of tasks in the two first-year writing courses, as evidenced by the rhetorical strategies employed by the writers in successive assignments? Focusing on the final argument assignments, how similar are they to argumentative writing in other contexts, in terms of rhetorical profiles? Methodology: We first conducted a local analysis, in which we used a dictionary-based corpus method to analyze the rhetorical strategies used by writers in the first-year writing courses to understand how they built on each other to form a sequence. Having understood what skills students are demonstrating in a course, we then conducted a global analysis which calculated a “distance” between the first-year argument writing and a corpus of argument writing drawn from other contexts. Recognizing that there was a non-trivial distance, we then identified and evaluated the sources of the distance so that the writing tasks could be assessed or modified. Results: The local analysis revealed eight key rhetorical strategies that student writing exhibits between the two first-year writing courses. With this understanding, we then placed the argument writing in global contexts to find that the assignments in both courses differ somewhat from argument writing in other contexts. Upon analyzing this difference, we found that the first-year writing primarily differs in its usage of academic language, the personal register, assertive language, and reasoning. We suggest that these differences stem primarily from the rhetorical situation and learning objectives associated with first-year writing, as well as the sequencing of the courses. Discussion: The three-step method presented provides a means for writing program administrators to describe and analyze writing that students produce in their writing programs. We intend these steps to be understood as an iterative process, whereby writing programs can use these results to evaluate what rhetorical skills their students are exhibiting and to benchmark those against the program’s goals and/or other similar writing programs. Conclusions: By presenting these analyses together, we ultimately provide a cohesive method by which to analyze a writing program and benchmark students’ use of rhetorical strategies in relation to other argumentative contexts. We believe this method to be useful not only to individual writing programs, but to assessment literature broadly. In future research, we anticipate learning how this process will practically feed back into pedagogy, as well as understanding what placing writing tasks into a global context can tell us about genre theory.

Background: The researchers conducted a corpus analysis of 548 research-based argument essays, totalling 1,465,091 words, written by first-year students at The City College of New York (CCNY). The purpose of this study was to better understand the ways in which CCNY students were constructing arguments in research essays in order to better support our instruction of the research essay. Curricular guidelines for the research assignment are general. Instructors are directed to require a research-based, persuasive argument that includes conflicting points of view. Model assignment sheets are provided to instructors, but they are free to write their own. Assignment sheets are not collected or approved. In the fall semester in which this corpus was collected, over 70 part-time instructors taught approximately 120 sections of the first- or second-semester composition course.Literature Review: The study of The City College of New York Corpus (CCNYC) partially replicates and relies on the analysis of three corpora of academic writing conducted by Zak Lancaster (2016a) in his examination of Gerald Graff’s and Cathy Birkenstein’s textbook They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (2014). The current study also compares the CCNYC findings to studies of stance and voice markers frequency conducted by Ken Hyland (2012) and Ellen Barton (1993) and suggests the classroom use of corpus analysis as described by Raith Abid and Shakila Manan (2015), and Maggie Charles (2007).Research Questions: The study was guided by a narrowly-focused interest in learning whether or not the CCNYC would demonstrate the range and distribution of rhetorical moves that Lancaster found in his study of academic writing (2016a). The analysis of the corpus consists of frequency counts; we did not conduct other statistical analyses. Since we had little prior experience with corpus analysis, we wondered what would be revealed about students’ writing practices by a partial replication of Lancaster’s study. We did not reproduce Lancaster’s analysis but relied on his publised results. This study served as an assessment tool, providing a microscopic view of a limited number of rhetorical moves across a large corpus of student essays. As a result of our study, we hoped to be able to create assignments for research essays that responded directly to the patterns that we saw in our students’ essays.Methodology: Modeled on Lancaster’s study and the templates of rhetorical moves offered by Graff and Birkenstein, concordances of terms used to introduce objections, offer concessions, and make counterarguments were drawn from the CCNYC and then analyzed to confirm that the rhetorical form was in fact functioning as one of the above rhetorical moves within the context of the essay in which it was found.Results: Our study demonstrates that CCNY students use fewer linguistic resources than their peers at other institutions, a finding that helps shape faculty development seminars. The corpus analysis reveals that while CCNY students introduce objections to their arguments at about the same rates as in other corpora, they are less likely to concede to those objections. In addition, when students made counterarguments, they used only a limited range of the linguistic resources available to them.Conclusions: The low rate of engagement with opposing points of view and the limited use of linguistic resources for counterarguments all suggest the potential value of focused, corpus-based instruction.

Background: Contemporary research in composition studies emphasizes the constitutive power of genres. It also highlights the prevalence of the most common genre in students’ transition into advanced college writing, the argumentative essay. Consistent with most research in composition, and therefore most studies of general, first-year college writing, such research has primarily emphasized genre context. Other research, in international applied linguistics research and particularly English for Academic Purposes (EAP), has focused less on first-year writers but has likewise shown the frequent use of argumentative essays in undergraduate writing. Together, these studies suggest that the argumentative essay is represented more than other genres in early college writing development, and that any given genre favors particular discourse features in contrast with other genres students might write. A productive next step, but one not yet realized, is to bring these discussions together, in research that uses context-informed corpus analysis that investigates students’ assignment contexts and analyzes the discourse that characterizes the tasks and genres students write. This study offers an exploratory, context-informed analysis of argumentative and explanatory writing by first-year college writers. Based on the corpus findings, the article underscores discourse as an integral part of the sociocognitive practices embedded in genres, and accordingly considers new ways to conceptualize student writing genres and to inform instruction and assignment design. Research questions: Four questions guided the inquiry: What are the key discursive practices associated with annotated bibliographies and argumentative essays written by the same students in the same course? What are the key discursive practices associated with visual analyses and argumentative essays written by the same students in the same course? What are the key discursive practices associated with the two argumentative tasks in comparison with the two explanatory tasks? Finally, how might corpus-based findings inform the design of particular assignment tasks and genres in light of a range of writing goals? Methodology: The article outlines a context-informed corpus analysis of lexical and grammatical keywords in part-of-speech tagged writing by first-year college students across courses at a U.S. institution. Using information from assignment descriptions and rubrics, the study considers four projects that also represent two macro-genres: an annotated bibliography and a visual analysis, both part of the explanatory macro-genre, and two argumentative essays, both part of the argumentative macro-genre. Results: The corpus analysis identifies lexical and grammatical keywords in each of the four tasks as well as in the macro-genres of argumentative versus explanatory writing. These include generalized, interpersonal, and persuasive discourse in argumentative essays versus more specified, informational, and elaborated discourse in explanatory writing, regardless of course or task. Based on these findings, the article discusses the discursive practices prioritized in each task and each macro-genre. Conclusions: The findings, based on key discourse patterns in tasks within the same course and in macro-genres across courses, pose important questions regarding writing task design and students’ adaptation to different genres. The macro-genre keywords specifically inform exploratory sociocognitive “profiles” of argumentative and explanatory tasks, offered in the final section. These argument and explanation profiles strive to account for discourse patterns, genre networks, and purposes and processes—in other words, multiple aspects of habituated thinking and writing practices entailed in each one relative to the other. As discussed in the conclusion, the profiles aim to (1) underscore discourse patterns as integral to the work of genres, (2) highlight adaptive discourse strategies as part of students’ meta-language for writing, and (3) identify multiple, macro-level (e.g., audience), meso-level (paragraph- and section-level), and micro-level (e.g., discourse patterns) aspects of genres to help instructors identify and specify multiple goals for writing assignments.