Linguistic characteristics of first-year university writing: a corpus investigation

Abstract

This study examines the characteristics of first-year composition writing using a corpus-driven approach. The corpus analyzed, COMP 101, consists of 383 texts totaling 188,184 words. These texts include seven essay genres: descriptive, narrative, classification, process analysis, compare and contrast, cause and effect, and argumentative. Using a genre-based theoretical framework, the study explores the most common language features found in first-year writing in a typical university classroom of native and non-native English speakers and how these features are represented across the different genres. According to the corpus analysis, the most frequently used features in COMP 101 include first-person pronouns, second-person pronouns, conjunctions, and punctuation marks. The study compares these findings to academic writing represented by the British Corpus of Academic Written English (BAWE). The findings reveal how first-year students engage with readers and establish identities in their texts using first and second-person pronouns. Also, the study notes a tendency to avoid using past participles and an overall conversational tone, demonstrated by a preference for contractions, question marks, and exclamation marks. The implications of these findings for the teaching of writing in this context are then discussed.