How Causal Relation Affects the Construction of Problem-Solution in Argumentation Essays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Problem-Solution text pattern is often used in academic writing. The present study investigates how Problem-Solution is used in non-native speaker (NNS) argumentation essays by Japanese speaking students, in comparison with native speaker (NS) essays by American students. By taking the clause relational approach, the present study attempts to find how the students use causal relation when employing the Problem-Solution pattern in their essays. The investigation focuses on problem, which is a causative device, as well as a shell noun that can construct the text. This paper will show that in the two corpora the students’ use of causal relation was similar in frequency and drew on the same types of causal categories; however, how the causal categories were expressed in lexico-grammatical patterns was often different. Furthermore, NNS students used problem in non-causal relation significantly more frequently than NS students did. This paper points to what lacked in NNS essays in order for the students to use causal relations in the same ways as NS students did in their essays (e.g., type of verbs, rheme-theme development). A discussion of the pedagogical implications of the findings provides insights which could be helpful to educators developing syllabi and teaching academic writing to NNS students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".