14

Researching Writing
Ken Hyland

Chapter Overview
Assumptions, Writing and Research
An Overview of Methods
A Sample Study
Resources for Further Reading
References

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Writing is fundamental to modern societies and of overarching significance in

all our lives: central to our personal experiences, life chances and social identities. Its complex, multifaceted nature, however, is dicult to pin down and as a
result, many research approaches have emerged to help clarify both how
writing works and the purposes it is employed to achieve. Research, in fact, has
taken philosophical, historical, empirical and critical directions and encompassed a wide range of dierent interpretive and quantitative methods. In this
chapter I briefly summarize and evaluate some of these and illustrate a sample
study.

Assumptions, Writing and Research

First of all, it is important to recognize that writing research does not simply
involve fi ing suitable methods to particular questions. Methods are inseparable from theories and how we understand writing itself. For some people,
writing is a product, an artefact of activity which can be studied independently
of users by counting features and inferring rules. For others, it is a kind of cognitive performance which can be modelled by analogy with computer processing through observation and writers on-task verbal reports. A third group sees
it as the ways we make our social worlds and explore how writing connects us
with readers and institutions in particular contexts. Dierent methods tell us
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dierent things about writing, but they always start with our preconceptions.
Simplifying a complex picture, it is possible to group research methods according to their principal focus and whether they are concerned with illuminating
our understanding of texts, writers or readers.

Text-Oriented Research
This views writing as an outcome of activity, as words on a page or screen and
can be descriptive (revealing what occurs), analytical (interpreting why it
occurs) or critical (questioning the social relations which underlie and are
reproduced by what occurs). Texts can also be examined in a variety of ways,
looking at particular features or their themes, cohesive elements or move structures. We can examine a text in isolation or as a sample from a single genre, time
period or writer, and we can collect a number of texts together as a corpus and
aggregate those features as representative of other texts.
Traditionally, research into texts followed views inherited from structuralism and implicit in the Transformational Grammar of Noam Chomsky. Texts
were seen as langue, or a demonstration of the writers knowledge of forms and
grammatical rules rather than a empts to communicate, and methods were the
means of revealing principles of writing independent of any actual contexts or
users. From this perspective, writing improvement is measured by counting
increases in features seen as important to successful writing and calculating the
syntactic complexity of texts by counting the number of words or clauses per
T-unit and the number of T-units per sentence. There is, however, li le evidence
to show that syntactic complexity or grammatical accuracy are either the
principal features of writing development or the best measures of good writing.
Essentially, viewing texts in this way ignores their role as communicative acts
and how they function as a writers response to a particular communicative
se ing. Because all texts include what writers suppose their readers will know,
and how they will use the text, no text can be fully explicit or universally
appropriate. Rather, they need to balance what needs to be said against what
can be assumed.

Writer-Oriented Research
This emphasizes the actions of writers rather than the features of texts.
Champions of this approach believe that writing constitutes a process, or at
least a complex of activities, from which all writing emerges and that this is
generalizable across contexts of writing. Interest here is on what good writers

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do when they write, principally so that these strategies can be taught to students.
Early work assumed that writing is more of a problem-solving activity than an
act of communication and drew on the tools and models of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence to reveal how people engage in a writing task to
create and revise personal meanings. More recent work has given greater
emphasis to the actual performance of writing in a particular context, exploring
what Nystrand (1987) calls the situation of expression, to investigate the personal
and social histories of individual writers as they write in specific contexts.
The goal is to describe the influence of this context on the ways writers
represent their purposes in the kind of writing that is produced. As Prior (1998,
p. xi) observes:
Actually writing happens in moments that are richly equipped with tools
(material and semiotic) and populated with others (past present, and
future). When seen as situated activity, writing does not stand alone as the
discrete act of a writer, but emerges as a confluence of many streams of
activity: reading, talking, observing, acting, making, thinking, and feeling
as well as transcribing words on paper.
By using detailed observations of acts of writing, participant interviews, analyses of surrounding practices, and other techniques, researchers seek to develop
more complete accounts of local writing contexts.
A range of methods have been employed to explore and elaborate the composing process, moving beyond text analysis to the qualitative methods of the
human and social sciences. Case study research has been particularly productive, focusing on natural scenes rather than on experimental environments, and
o en seeking to describe writing from an emic perspective, privileging the views
of insiders or those participating in a situation. These studies have thus made
considerable use of think aloud protocols, or writers verbal reports while
composing (e.g., Smagorinsky 1994), retrospective interviews (e.g., Nelson and
Carson 1998) and task observation (e.g., Bosher 1998), sometimes involving
keystroke recording during composing (e.g., Sullivan and Lindgren 2006). O en
research is longitudinal, following students over an extended period (e.g.,
F. Hyland 1998) and uses multiple techniques which may include recall protocols, and analyses of several dra s.
However, while these descriptions give significant a ention to the experiences of writers and to their understandings of the local features of the context
they deal with as they write, concentrating on the local se ing fails to capture
the culture and event within which the action is embedded and which their
writing must invoke. Texts do not function communicatively at the time they
are composed but when they are read, as they anticipate particular readers and

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the responses of those readers to what is wri en. Texts evoke a social milieu
which intrudes upon the writer and activates specific responses to recurring
tasks and as a result most current writing research takes a more reader-oriented
view to explore the ways writers see their audience and engage in cultural
contexts.

Reader-Oriented Research
This looks beyond individual writers and the surface structures of products to
see texts as examples of discourse, or language in use. Discourse approaches
recognize that texts are always a response to a particular communicative se ing
and seek to reveal the purposes and functions which linguistic forms serve in
texts. Here texts are not isolated examples of competence but the concrete
expressions of social purposes, intended for particular audiences. The writer is
seen as having certain goals and intentions, certain relationships to his or her
readers, and certain information to convey, and the forms a text takes are
resources used to accomplish these. Writing is therefore seen as mediated by
the institutions and cultures in which it occurs and every text is embedded in
wider social practices which carry assumptions about writer-reader relationships and how these should be structured. These factors draw the analyst into
a wider paradigm which locates texts in a world of communicative purposes,
institutional power and social action, identifying the ways that texts actually
work as communication.
One way writers are able to construct an audience is by drawing on their
own knowledge of other texts and by exploiting readers abilities to recognize
intertextuality between texts. This view owes its origins to Bakhtins (1986) view
that language is fundamentally dialogic, a conversation between writer and
reader is an ongoing activity. Writing reflects traces of its social uses because it
is multiply linked and aligned with other texts upon which it builds and which
it anticipates. Each u erance refutes, arms, supplements, and relies on the
others, presupposes them to be known and somehow takes them into account
(Ibid., p. 91). A key idea here is that of genre, a term for grouping texts together
and referring to the repertoire of linguistic responses writers are able to call
on to communicate in familiar situations. Genre reminds us that when we write
we follow conventions for organizing messages because we want our readers
to recognize our purposes. Research into genres therefore seeks to show how
language forms work as resources for accomplishing goals, describing the
stages which help writers to set out their thoughts in ways readers can easily
follow and identifying salient features of texts which allow them to engage
eectively with their readers.

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An Overview of Methods
While I have divided methods up according to the paradigms with which they
are mainly associated, much writing research combines several methods, o en
both quantitative and qualitative, to gain a more complete picture of a complex
reality. In fact, the concept of triangulation, or the use of multiple sources of data,
or approaches, can bring greater plausibility to the interpretation of results.
It obviously makes sense to view research pragmatically, adopting whatever
tools seem most eective and a researcher may, for example, gather student
opinions about their writing practices through a questionnaire and supplement
this with interview or diary data, and with the dra s of their essays, mixing
methods to increase the validity of the eventual findings.
Another feature of writing research is that it tends to favour data gathered in
naturalistic rather than controlled conditions. This is not to say that methods
that elicit data through questionnaires, structured interviews or experiments are
not employed or that they have nothing to tell us about writing. It is simply that
there has been a strong preference for collecting data in authentic circumstances
not specifically set up for the research, such as via classroom observations or
analyses of naturally occurring texts. The main methods for researching writing
are summarized in Figure 14.1 (Hyland 2003) and discussed briefly below.

Elicitation: Questionnaires and Interviews

These are the main methods for eliciting information and a itudes from informants. Questionnaires are widely used for collecting large amounts of structured,

Questionnaires:

Highly focused elicitations of respondent self-reports about actions

and attitudes

Interviews:

Adaptable and interactive elicitations of respondent self-reports

Verbal reports:

Retrospective accounts and think aloud reports of thoughts while

composing

Written reports:

Diary or log accounts of personal writing or learning experiences

Observation:

Direct or recorded data of live interactions or writing behaviour

Texts:

Study of authentic examples of writing used for communication in a

natural context

Case studies:

A collection of techniques capturing the experiences of participants

in a situation

Figure 14.1 Main data collection methods for researching writing (Hyland 2003,
p. 253)

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o en numerical, easily analysable self-report data, while interviews oer more

flexibility and greater potential for elaboration and detail. Both allow researchers to tap peoples views and experiences of writing, but interviews tend to be
more qualitative and heuristic and questionnaires more quantitative and
conclusive. Questionnaires are particularly useful for exploratory studies into
writing a itudes and behaviours and for identifying issues that can be followedup later by more in-depth methods. One major use of questionnaires in writing
research has been to discover the kinds of writing target communities require
from students. Rogerson-Revell (2007), for example, used a questionnaire to
shed light on participants use of English in business meetings in a European
company and to identify some of the language diculties that can result.
Interviews oer more interactive and less predetermined modes of eliciting
information. Although sometimes li le more than oral questionnaires, interviews generally represent a very dierent way of understanding human experience, regarding knowledge as generated between people rather than as
objectified and external to them. Participants are able to discuss their interpretations and perspectives, sharing what writing means to them rather than
responding to preconceived categories. This flexibility and responsiveness
means that interviews are used widely in writing research to learn more about
writing practices (to discover the genres people write and how they understand
and go about writing); about teaching and learning practices (to discover peoples
beliefs and practices about teaching and learning) and about discourse-features
(to discover how text users see and respond to particular features of writing).
Interviews are particularly valuable as they can reveal issues that might be
dicult to predict, such as the kinds of problems that students might have in
understanding teacher feedback (Hyland and Hyland 2001).

Introspection: Verbal and Written Reports

The use of verbal reports as data reflects the idea that the process of writing
requires conscious a ention and that at least some of the thought process
involved can be recovered, either as a retrospective wri en or spoken recall or
simultaneously with writing as a think aloud protocol.
Protocols involve participants writing in their normal way but instructed to
verbalize all thinking at the same time so that information can be collected on
their decisions, their strategies and their perceptions as they work. Think aloud
data have been criticised as oering an artificial and incomplete picture of the
complex cognitive activities involved in writing. For one thing many cognitive
processes are routine and internalized operations and therefore not available to
verbal description while, more seriously, the act of verbal reporting may itself

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slow task progress or distort the process being reported on. But despite
these criticisms, the method has been widely used, partly because the alternative is to deduce cognitive processes solely from subjects behaviour, and this
would obviously be far less reliable. Think aloud techniques have been
extremely productive in revealing the strategies writers use when composing,
particularly what students do when planning and revising texts. In one study,
for example, de Larios et al. (1999) used the method to examine what students
did when they were blocked by a language problem or wanted to express
a dierent meaning, tracing the pa erns they used in searching for an alternative syntactic plan.
Diaries oer an alternative way of gaining introspective data. These are
first-person accounts of a language-using experience, documented through
regular entries in a journal and then analysed for recurring pa erns or
significant events. Diarists can be asked to produce narrative entries which
freely introspect on their learning or writing experiences, or be set guidelines to
restrict the issues addressed. These can be in the form of detailed points to note
(write about what you found most/least interesting about this class) or a loose
framework for response (note all the work you did to complete this task).
Alternatively, researchers may ask diarists to concentrate only on critical
incidents of personal significance or to simply record dates and times of
writing. While some diarists may resent the time and intrusion involved,
diaries provide a rich source of reflective data which can reveal social and
psychological processes dicult to collect in other ways. Thus Nelson (1993)
used diaries to discover how her students went about writing a research paper,
following their trail through the library, how they evaluated sources and took
notes, the conversations they had with others, decisions they made, and so on.
This approach provided a rich account of writers reflections, suggesting why
they acted as they did and how they saw contextual influences.

Observations
While elicitation and introspective methods provide reports of what people say
they think and do, observation methods oer actual evidence of it by systematic
documentation of participants engaged in writing and learning to write. They
are based on conscious noticing and precise recording of actions as a way of
seeing these actions in a new light. Once again there are degrees of structure the
researcher can impose on the data, from simply checking pre-defined boxes at
fixed intervals or every time a type of behaviour occurs, to writing a full narrative of events. The most highly structured observations employ a prior coding
scheme to highlight significant events from the mass of data that taped or live

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observation can produce (see Hyland 2003 for examples). All observation will
necessarily privilege some behaviours and neglect others, as we only record
what we think is important, but while a clear structure is easier to apply and
yields more manageable data, such pre-selection may ignore relevant behaviour that wasnt predicted.
Observation is o en combined with other methods, as in Cami as
(1993) three-year study of vernacular writing among adolescents. She observed
and interviewed writers of dierent races and genders between the ages
of 14 and 18 outside school, in free school time when they clustered in groups
to talk and write, and in writing surreptitiously in class. She found that
these students produced a wide variety of genres and that when writing was
free of school constraints it generated considerable interest and much oral
sharing.

Text Data
Finally, a major source of data for writing research is writing itself: the use of
texts as objects of study. While texts can be approached in a variety of ways,
most research now seeks to discover how people use language in specific contexts. The main approaches to studying wri en texts are currently genre and
corpus analyses.

Genre Analysis
This embraces a range of tools and a itudes to texts, from detailed qualitative
analyses of a single text to more quantitative counts of language features.
Sometimes researchers work with a single text, either because it is inherently
interesting or because it seems representative of a larger set of texts or particular genre. A major policy speech, a newspaper editorial or an important
scientific article can oer insights into forms of persuasion, particular syntactic
or lexical choices, or the views of text writers. More generally, a sample essay
may shed light on students uses of particular forms or the assumptions underlying dierent choices. Bhatia (1993) suggests some basic steps for conducting
a genre analysis which emphasize the importance of locating texts in their
contexts as presented in Figure 14.2.
Such an approach forms a case study, but while this is a widely recognized
method, it raises questions about how far a single can be representative of a
genre. Representativeness is strengthened if several texts are analysed, and
corpus analyses, drawing on evidence from large databases of electronically
encoded texts, are the main way of achieving this.
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1 Select a text which seems representative of the genre you want to study.
2 Place the text in a situational context, i.e., use your background knowledge and text clues to guess where the
genre is used, by whom, and why it is written the way it is.
3 Compare the text with other similar texts to ensure that it broadly represents the genre.
4 Study the institutional context in which the genre is used (through site visits, interviews, manuals, etc.) to
better understand its conventions.
5 Select a focus for analysis (moves, lexis, cohesion, persuasion, etc.) and analyse it.
6 Check your analysis with a specialist informant to conrm your ndings and insights.

Figure 14.2 Steps in genre analysis (after Bhatia 1993, pp. 2234)

Corpus Analysis
A corpus is simply a collection of naturally occurring language samples
(o en consisting of millions of words) which represent a speakers experience
of language in some restricted domain, thereby providing a more solid basis for
genre descriptions. A corpus provides an alternative to intuition by oering
both a resource against which intuitions can be tested and a mechanism for
generating them. This enables analysts to depict what is usual in a genre, rather
than what is simply grammatically possible, and helps to suggest explanations
for why language is used as it is in particular contexts.
Corpus studies are therefore based on both qualitative and quantitative
methods, using evidence of frequency and association as starting points for interpretation. Frequency is based on the idea that if a word, string or grammatical
pa ern occurs regularly in a particular genre or subset of language, then we can
assume it is significant in how that genre is routinely constructed. Association
refers to the ways features associate with each other in collocational pa erns.
A concordance programme brings together all instances of a search word or
phrase in the corpus as a list of unconnected lines of text and so allows the
analyst to see regularities in its use that might otherwise be missed. In other
words, we can see instances of language use when we read these lines horizontally and evidence of system when we read them vertically, pointing to common
usage in this genre.
In a study of the acknowledgement sections from 240 masters and doctoral
dissertations, for example, I found a strong tendency to use the noun thanks in
preference to other expressions of gratitude (Hyland 2004). Sorting concordance lines on the word to the le of this search word revealed this noun was
modified by only three adjectives: special, sincere and deep with special making
up over two-thirds of all cases. Figure 14.3 is a screen shot from the programme
MonoConc Pro showing part of the results of this sorting.
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Figure 14.3 Special thanks pattern in Masters/Doctoral acknowledgements

(Hyland, 2008, p. 546)

A Sample Study
To illustrate some of these ideas and to show what one approach to writing
research looks like in practice, the remainder of this chapter reports on a study
of Hong Kong undergraduates writing I conducted a few years ago (Hyland
2002). I will discuss the main stages under four headings: framing issues, selecting methods, collecting data and analysing data.
Framing the issue: The study emerged from a sense that my undergraduate
students had considerable problems constructing a credible representation of
themselves and their work in their research writing. They seemed reluctant to
claim an appropriate degree of authoritativeness in their texts and to get behind
their statements, making their work seem anonymous and disembodied.
I decided to pursue these impressions by investigating how these students used
authorial pronouns, framing the issue by relating the use of first person to rhetorical identity. This sees identity as less a phenomenon of private experience
than a need for aliation and recognition in particular social networks. When
we write in particular genres there is strong pressure to take on their forms and
represent ourselves in a way valued by that community. This does not mean
that writers simply slot into ready-made identities, but it limits individual
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manoeuvre. Newcomers, however, o en find that the discourses of their

disciplines support identities very dierent from those they bring with them
from their home cultures, which prevent them from communicating appropriate commitments and undermine their relationship to readers.
Selecting methods: Framing pronoun use in terms of the constraints on rhetorical conventions of personality suggested two possible lines of inquiry.
Basically, to adopt an ethnographic approach and focus on particular writers,
investigating their personal and social histories and how these influenced their
writing of academic assignments; or to look for preferred choices of pronoun
use in a representative collection of student writing and interview writers about
their choices. I decided on the la er, partly because I was more comfortable
with the methods involved and partly because I wanted a wider picture of how
they saw the demands of the task and chose to represent themselves in this
context. A corpus approach oers a starting point for analysis by providing
quantitative information about the relative frequency and use of self-mention,
pointing to systematic tendencies in students choices of meanings. To understand why writers made the choices they did I decided to support the text data
with interviews, using focus groups as a way of reducing the threat to these
L2 students.
Collecting data: To ensure that the text samples were representative of undergraduate research writing, I compiled a corpus of 64 final year project reports,
a genre of 8,000 to 12,000 words and by far the most substantial piece of writing
students do in their undergraduate careers. I obtained a broad cross-section of
academic practice by collecting eight reports from each of eight dierent degree
programmes, including sciences, engineering, social sciences, technology and
business. This involved ge ing agreement from writers and electronic copies of
their reports. I then computer-searched the corpus for the first person uses I, me,
my, we, us, our, mine and ours using a commercially available concordance programme, and checked all cases to ensure they were exclusive first person uses.
While corpus analyses are excellent for telling us what writers do, to stop
here runs the danger of reifying conventions rather than explaining them.
I therefore conducted interviews with a supervisor from each field and with
student writers. The supervisors were asked about their own writing, that of
their students, and their impressions of disciplinary practices. The student
interviews required more scaolding and a more supportive environment and
were conducted as focus groups of four or five students. All interviews had two
parts. First, I asked participants to respond to features in selected texts as either
writers or members of the readership for whom the texts were composed as a
way of making explicit the tacit knowledge or strategies that they brought to
acts of composing or reading. This was followed by more general observations
of pronoun use to learn how respondents saw the practices of the cultures
and communities that influenced their writing. All interviews were taped and
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wri en up as a summary immediately a er the session and subsequently

returned to several times, o en with the assistance of the subjects.
Analysing data: The frequency counts showed 637 occurrences. In several
sweeps of the data I also noted the surrounding text of the target words to identify recurring pragmatic functions. Checking concordance lines is a recursive
procedure which involves trying to narrow down, expand and combine initial
categories. This recursion allowed me to classify each instance as performing
one of five functions, either stating a goal, explaining a procedure, stating results
or claims, expressing self-benefits, or elaborating an argument. I validated the
analysis by asking a colleague to independently code a sample of data.
In order to be er understand student choices I compared the findings with
those of expert writers using an existing corpus of 240 published research
articles in cognate disciplines. These papers were selected from journals on
students reading lists and totalled 1.3 million words, twice as large as the
student corpus in order to strengthen observations about expert practices, as
opposed to those about a specific student population. Analysis of the two
corpora showed that first person pronouns were substantially more frequent in
the published corpus and that the students generally sought to downplay their
authorial identity by consciously avoiding its most authoritative functions such
as making a commitment to an interpretation or claim. In other words, they
sought to deny ownership and responsibility for their views. I set out to investigate these findings further through the interviews.
I also approached the interview data recursively using a form of content
analysis, beginning with obvious or recurring topics and looking for themes.
Subsequent passes through the data helped to generate and refine categories,
identify core ideas, find links and gradually build a picture of the data. I a ended
to the frequency with which particular ideas occurred, the strength of their
expression, their distribution across the informants, and the rationale for the
study. The data revealed a lot about beliefs and practices and raised issues concerning the students intentions in using self-mention, their previous encounters
with it in textbooks and class teaching, and their sense of its meanings. It showed
that the students were sensitive to the eects of author pronouns and reluctant
to accept its clear connotations of authority and commitment. They viewed the
use of I with misgivings as it seemed to imply an identity they did not want.
Together, analysis of the corpus and interview material suggested that culture
and context shape our communicative practices in significant ways, influencing
our preferences for structuring information, the relationships we establish with
our readers, and how far we want to personally appear in our texts.
Conclusions: I have a empted to provide an overview of writing research
approaches in this chapter. While space prevents elaboration, I hope to have
shown that the questions we ask, the methods we adopt and the ways we
interpret data, are all products of the ways we understand what writing is.
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Explanation involves selecting texts and features through the filter of our theories and research interests and si ing out the ways that writers interests, beliefs,
aliations, experiences, values and practices appear to influence their writing.
Because these are not things that can be directly observed, the researcher must
select from a repertoire of interpretations rather than hit on the truth, but by
grounding these interpretations in wri en and oral data we help to ensure that
they are not pure speculation either. Ultimately, all we can claim for our research
is that our findings are a plausible interpretation of some aspect of a given
context of communication.

Resources for Further Reading

Baker, P. (2006), Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
This is an accessible guide to creating and analysing wri en corpora. Topics
covered include corpus building, concordancing, keyness, frequency and
dispersion.
Hyland, K. (2003), Second Language Writing. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
This is a teachers guide to analysing and teaching L2 writing, with chapters on
establishing students needs, designing syllabuses, creating and sequencing
tasks, and feedback and assessment. It contains a chapter on dierent writing
research methods with examples.
Hyland, K. (2002), Teaching and Researching Writing. London: Longman.
This book is an overview of writing with an up-to-date discussion of theories on
writing together with methods for research and teaching. It also contains ideas
for writing research projects together with example studies.
Smagorinsky, P. (ed.) (1994). Speaking about writing: Reflections on research
methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Chapters in this book contain discussions and studies using a range of oral
elicitation techniques including think-aloud protocols, retrospective accounts,
ethnographic interviews and stimulated recall.
There are also a number of free concordance tools on the web which allow you to
search a range of academic, student, newspaper and literary corpora. The best of
these are:
VLC Web Concordancer at: h p://www.edict.com.hk/concordance/
CobuildDirect site at h p://www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

References
Bakhtin, M. (1986), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press.
Bhatia, V. K. (1993), Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Seings. London:
Longman.

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Bosher, S. (1998). The composing processes of three southeast Asian writers at the
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Cami a, M. (1993), Vernacular writing: Varieties of literacy among Philadelphia
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de Larios, J., Murphy, L. and Manchon, R. (1999), The use of restructuring strategies
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Nystrand, M. (1987), The role of context in wri en communication, in R. Horowitz
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