Tuesday, October 3rd, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT

Zoom Information:
msu.zoom.us/my/sommerfarias
Meeting ID: 296 919 6867
Password: Ametista

Shelley Staples, Associate Professor of English Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, Department of English, University of Arizona

While most SLA researchers agree that grammatical complexity is a major component of language development (Bulten & Housen, 2014; Ortega, 2003), scholars are still exploring ways of operationalizing complexity. This talk will focus on one recent approach, the Register-Functional Approach to Grammatical Complexity (Biber et al., 2011; Staples et al., 2016; 2022; Biber, Gray, Staples & Egbert, 2022) which relies on empirical work in corpus-based register analysis, focusing on standardized rates of occurrence for specific grammatical features with high frequencies and important functions in the target register (e.g., the high rates of nouns and adjectives as nominal modifiers in academic writing, used for information packaging). In this talk, I examine patterns across first year writing (composition), looking at variation across genres (e.g., literature reviews vs. literacy narratives), course level and type (e.g., ENGL 101/107 and 102/108), and proficiency level (TOEFL, IELTS). The presentation illustrates how this approach can be used to elucidate patterns of language development in academic writing while taking situational characteristics and the resulting variation into account. Implications for classroom teaching will also be discussed.