Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

1190

Date

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Concentration

Applied Linguistics

Committee Chair

Teresa Dalle

Committee Member

Charles Hall

Committee Member

Emily Thrush

Committee Member

Reginald Martin

Abstract

The field of ESP encompasses a number of areas. In the developing area of English for Art Purposes or Art ESP, there is almost no material in publication for Art schools and other programs to use. This dissertation addresses the need for material in this field by using contrastive corpus analysis to identify suitable material for this subject and then discusses how contrastive analysis software can also be used to help create content in the form of lesson plans and curriculum material. This study focuses on the unique language features of modern art criticism and photography criticism by looking at the driving differences that characterize each genre by asking the following research questions: 1.Can the language of photography criticism in terms of indicative linguistic features be considered as a distinct genre from modern art criticism? 2.If so, which features drive these differences, and how can the identification of these features be used to create content material for use with nonnative English speakers? This study used a contrastive analysis method by utilizing a computational tool called the Gramulator to isolate and identify the characteristic features that differentiate a Photography Criticism corpus of 48 samples and a Modern Art Criticism corpus of 94 samples. The main findings were viewed in terms of one, two and three word collocations. The software tool also viewed the amount of narrative and science language used in each corpus. The results for this section of the study showed a predicted result of a high rate of scientific language with 30 out of 48 samples showing science language. The Modern Art results were more surprising with a very near split of 44 out of 94 showing science language and 50 out of 94 showing narrative. The software tool was then used to show and discuss how these results could be utilized to create different content for the area of Art ESP. The results were then concluded to support the claim that these are two separate genres of writing.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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