“That Was the Start of an Academic Career” - a Mixed-methodology Corpus-based Study of TEFL Theses and Portfolios

Abstract

This dissertation explores ESP and academic writing and examines the Hungarian context in a mixed-methodology approach investigating the process of writing TEFL theses and portfolios submitted at the University of Pécs. Part I comprising three chapters provides an overview of previous research in the field. Chapter 1 introduces the reader into the topic of ESP by summarizing research done in separate subfields and reconsidering them by creating a formula applicable to any domain, E(x)P. Next, Chapter 2 defines the concept of academic discourse and narrows the focus to written academic discourse discussing discoursal features and genres, touching upon the topic of identity. Chapter 3 reports on the context of teacher education in Europe zooming in on the Hungarian context to provide an in-depth overview of the fundamental factors and changes in the preceding years. Subsequently, the five chapters of Part II establish the framework of the studies and report four studies in the field of TEFL. I introduce the social constructionist mindset and provide a comprehensive and concise overview on web and desktop applications used in the studies, tools, Vocabprofile Compleat Web VP, AntWordprofiler, AntConc, Coh-Metrix Web Tool, NVivo, and Word counter, are described in detail with special attention to integral corpora, word lists, and specific indices. Chapter 5 explores the use of narrative interviews as data collection instruments in a pilot study conducted on pivotal life events, career choices, and essential competencies reported by novice teachers. Interview sessions of the pilot study reveal narratives elaborating on positive and negative experiences as well. Data imply that novice teachers’ experiences were highly determined by their teachers and pivotal events encountered during their university studies, and in one case the influence of the mentor teachers’ negative attitude resulted in the interviewee leaving the teacher profession. This small-sized study assists the development of the interview questions in the case studies in Chapter 8. Chapter 6 is an inquiry into the nature of EFL teacher trainees’ vocabulary using a corpus-based approach. A specialized corpus of 1,495,058 tokens incorporating TEFL theses and portfolios written at the UP is analyzed to explore teacher trainees’ general- and specific-purpose lexis and academic vocabulary use. It also explores the coverage of low-frequency vocabulary in individual texts and reveals the nature of off-list words in theses and portfolios. Lexical statistics disclose that teacher trainees used a wide range of high frequency, general vocabulary in their academic writing samples resulting in a high ratio of general vocabulary coverage. Abbreviations and profession specific vocabulary are found in the low-frequency list, not covered by the reference word lists. The mixed-methodology study reported in Chapter 7 combines a quantitative corpus-based approach with qualitative textual analysis. The study focuses on reflective writing scripts submitted as part of TEFL portfolios in order to reveal lexical features and recurring themes of a twofold document reporting on both the professional and personal development of teacher trainees. The lexical analysis reveals a high ratio of general-purpose vocabulary in the documents and the dearth of low-frequency or academic vocabulary. Findings suggest the need for genre-specific improvement of teacher trainees’ language use, more specifically their academic and technical vocabulary use in reflective writing. The analysis of linguistic features shows that even though texts were well-constructed and utilize multi-clause sentences built up with logical relations, an overuse of cohesive devices was found in certain cases which might result in disturbing expert readers. Overall, 1,726 coding references were identified by the NVivo program and codes center around four main topics: teaching, language, school, and learning. Chapter 8 focuses on novice teachers’ beliefs and views by examining narratives told during interview sessions. The study addresses six factors: teacher competencies and characteristics, thesis topics, challenges while writing, their retrospective evaluation of the submitted documents, changes in retrospection, and advice for future trainees. Narrative interviews identified no pivotal events which resulted in participants leaving the profession in contrast to the study presented in Chapter 5. The findings show that thesis topics were related to the theme of teaching, and the main motives involved scaffolding student learning, passion, self-improvement, past experience, and continuing previous work. The retrospective evaluation of the documents uncovered teachers’ beliefs about their written products. The findings of the studies have implications for corpus linguistics research, as well as students and teachers in teacher education.