Lexico-grammatical variation in online academic forum posts across tasks, first language background, and writing quality

The developments in educational technology and increase in distance learners have resulted in the use of digital innovative assessment tasks (e.g. Culpeper & Kan, 2020). This study examines a relatively new register, online academic discussion forum posts which are used as a form of assessment in higher education. Online academic discussion forums provide a platform for students to exchange their views with their peers and contribute to the discussions on prompts provided by their lecturer on a specific topic. This study addressed the following research question: To what extent, if any, are there differences in terms of lexico-grammatical features in online written forum posts across subregisters and first language (L1) backgrounds? The data consist of corpora of online academic discussion forum posts written by L1 and second language (L2) English writers who studied for an MA programme at a UK university. This study used a multidimensional analysis to investigate lexico-grammatical features of online academic forum posts. By using an multidimensional analysis developed by Biber (1998), the lexico-grammatical characteristics of online academic forum posts were explored across two L1 backgrounds (L1 Chinese and L1 English) and three subregisters. The findings have pedagogical implications for English for academic purposes in tertiary settings and academic digital literacies.

Keywords: register variation; multidimensional analysis; academic discourse; forum posts.

References

Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK: CUP.

Culpeper, J., & Kan, Q. (2020). Communicative styles, rapport and student engagement: An online peer mentoring scheme. Applied Linguistics, 41(5), 756–786. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz035