Verb tense and aspect in successful student writing: a corpus study to inform EAP instruction

Lewis, Lily (2025). Verb tense and aspect in successful student writing: a corpus study to inform EAP instruction. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs support international students in English-medium studies (Pearson, 2020). For these students, competency in writing is paramount to academic success. However, second language writers often struggle to acquire the grammatical conventions of academic writing (Ravichandran et al., 2017). Previous studies of writing in EAP have found pervasive verb tense/aspect (TA) errors across a variety of task types and lengths, and among learners of different first languages and levels of English proficiency (Romano, 2019).

This thesis is a corpus study of TA in the writing of final-year undergraduate students and graduate students in the U.S. By understanding how TA is used effectively by successful student writers, EAP instructors can teach these topics more effectively, as corpus analysis facilitates informed decision-making on scope and sequence of grammatical items (Conrad, 2016).

Two corpora are used in the research: the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP, 2009) and a corpus compiled for this study, the Senior Thesis Proposal (STP) corpus, a collection of 32 texts in four disciplines from 18 U.S. universities. This research introduces a novel method for identifying and quantifying TA, with automated searches of over 1.5 million tokens in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) and quantitative analysis in R (R Core Team, 2021). Both corpora were analyzed for TA by discipline. In MICUSP, TA was also compared by sentence position. In the STP corpus, rhetorical moves were tagged by hand and analyzed for TA, providing insight into the rhetorical structure of this genre.

Analysis of both corpora indicates large differences in frequency of use for the 12 TAs in what appears to be a Zipfian distribution. Present simple is found in more than 60% of tensed verb phrases, a rate that is more than double the next most frequent TA, past simple. Together, these two TAs account for more than 75% of all verbs in both corpora. While present perfect and future simple are the third and fourth most frequent TAs in MICUSP, future simple is more frequent than present perfect in the STP corpus. Present progressive is the fifth most frequent TA in both. Each of the remaining seven TAs appears in fewer than 1% of tensed verb phrases, indicating infrequent use. Future perfect progressive is entirely unattested in the data.

Most TAs have relatively consistent rates of use across the sentences of a paragraph, with two notable exceptions: present perfect and future simple. Present perfect is most frequent in paragraph-initial position and decreases in frequency as the paragraph progresses. Future simple is least frequent at the beginning of a paragraph and increases in frequency as the paragraph progresses. Four uses for paragraph-final future simple verbs are proposed in this study.

Discipline is a statistically significant variable for TA use in both MICUSP and the STP corpus, but no disciplinary classifications were identified to account for these differences, and the same five TAs are the most frequent in nearly all disciplines studied. These results suggest it is rhetorical moves, not discipline, which account for the greatest variation in TA use.

A total of 11 moves were identified for senior thesis proposals, building on the rhetorical moves framework created by Connor and Mauranen (1999). Means is the most frequent move and the only one classified as obligatory; all other moves are conventional or optional (Kanoksilapatham, 2007). While there is no set order of moves that recur in student research proposals, most moves tend to appear more often in certain segments of the text than others.

Present simple is the most frequent TA in every move, and general timeless truth is its most common function. However, the second and third most frequent TAs vary, and the functions of all TAs vary as well: the same TA can serve different purposes. The functional relationships between TA choices and rhetorical moves bolster the case for a genre-based approach to EAP writing (Hyland, 2007; A. Johns, 2003).

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):