“To Whom It May Concern”: A Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles in Email Writing Tasks in an English Proficiency Test
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lexical bundles are worthy of attention in both teaching and testing writing asthey function as basic building blocks of discourse. This corpus-based study focuseson the rated writing responses to the email tasks in the Canadian EnglishLanguage Proficiency Index Program® General test (CELPIP-General) and exploresthe extent to which lexical bundles could help characterize the written responsesof the test-takers of different English proficiency levels. Three subcorporaof email writing responses were created based on test-takers’ proficiency levels.AntConc 3.4.4 was used to identify 2- to 6-word lexical bundles, which were thenmanually coded for their discourse functions. The results showed that test-takersof higher proficiency levels used more lexical bundles in terms of both bundle typesand tokens compared with test-takers of lower proficiency level. The writing samplesof different proficiency levels shared some lexical bundles, and overall theyhad similar proportional distributions of lexical bundle functions. Nevertheless,noticeable differences among the proficiency levels were observed in the proportionaldistributions of the subfunctions of stance bundles, discourse organizingbundles, and bundles of other functions. The identification of differential use oflexical bundles can contribute to a better understanding of English learners’ emailwriting performance.Les expressions figées méritent notre attention tant en enseignement qu’en évaluationde l’écrit puisqu’elles jouent le rôle de composantes de base du discours.Cette étude basée sur des corpus porte sur des réponses écrites par courriel à destâches et évalue la mesure dans laquelle les expressions figées pourraient aiderà caractériser les réponses écrites des participants de différentes compétencesen anglais. Trois sous corpus de réponses écrites par courriel ont été créés enfonction des niveaux de compétence des participants. AntConc 3.4.4 a servi dansl’identification d’expressions figées composées de 2 à 6 mots qui ont ensuite étécodées manuellement selon leurs fonctions discursives. Les résultats indiquentque les participants de niveaux de compétence plus élevés employaient plusd’expressions figées et de types plus variés comparativement aux participants deniveaux de compétence plus bas. Les échantillons de textes de différents niveauxde compétence partageaient quelques expressions figées et, globalement, avaientdes distributions proportionnelles d’expressions figées similaires. Toutefois, desdifférences notables entre les niveaux de compétence ont été observées dans ladistribution proportionnelle des sous fonctions discursives. L’identification desdifférences dans l’emploi des expressions figées peut contribuer à une meilleure compréhension du rendement des apprenants d’anglais quand ils écrivent des courriels.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it