Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education

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Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar *, Elyas Barabadi University of Bojnord, Bojnurd, Islamic Republic of Iran Received 19 August 2019; received in revised form 8 January 2020; accepted 12 January 2020

Abstract Recent scholarship on phraseology in academic writing has concentrated on phrase frames (p-frames), which are recurrent sequences of identical words with a variable slot. The present study purports to identify the key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. The corpus used in this research consists of the discussions of research articles published from 2013 to 2018 in thirteen leading journals in the field of higher education. The p-frames extracted by KfNgram were compared with the British Academic Written English Corpus1 to find those phraseological items specific to the discipline of higher education, resulting in a list of 58 four-word and 40 five-word p-frames that are key to the research article discussion in this field. Moreover, the majority of these frames were found to be non-verb content word phrases, and referential expressions in terms of discourse function. Pedagogical implications for discipline-specific writing programs are offered. © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Phrase frames; Discussion; Higher education; Discipline-specific writing

1. Introduction Previous research on phraseology has indicated that phrases, not individual words in isolation, are a primary carrier of meaning in a language (Römer, 2010). As such, to locate meaning in a genre, researchers need to explore and identify its phraseological items (Le and Harrington, 2015; Römer, 2010). A large number of studies in the field of corpus linguistics have investigated formulaic expressions in academic writing. Some research attention has been paid to providing lists of frequent formulaic sequences in academic genres (e.g., Ackermann and Chen, 2013; Hyland, 2008; Martinez and Schmitt, 2012; Simpson-Vlach and Ellis, 2010). These studies have mostly explored recurrent word combinations such as lexical bundles (Breeze, 2013; Gilmore and Millar, 2018; Hyland, 2008), collocations (Ackermann and Chen, 2013), and word clusters (Le and Harrington, 2015). This line of research has generally demonstrated that these strings have a considerable frequency in the specified genres and their lexico-grammatical characteristics can be related to the

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S.E. Golparvar), [email protected] (E. Barabadi). 1 The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (www.coventry.ac.uk/bawe) was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes, under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804 0024-3841/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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discourse function of those genres. Such approaches have mostly focused on continuous expressions, while identifying recurrent discontinuous sequences in academic genres has quite recently attracted researchers’ attention (Vincent, 2013). One type of discontinuous sequences in which researchers have recently shown an increasing interest is phrase frame (p-frame), which are recurrent multiword units with a variable slot (Römer, 2010). For instance, the sequences the aim of this study, the goal of this study, and the focus of this study, which form the p-frame the * of this study, have the empty slot filled with aim, goal, and focus. Vincent (2013) has suggested that phraseological frames enable researchers to deal with a higher level of variation in phraseology and demonstrate which frame types are more frequently observed in a given genre. Some recent ESP scholarship has investigated p-frames in research articles (RAs) and has provided lists of pedagogically useful p-frames (Cunningham, 2017; Lu et al., 2018). Despite the facilitating role of phraseological frames for ESP pedagogy, there is a paucity of corpus-based research on p-frames in different genres and registers, particularly different sections of RAs. Moreover, different genres and registers encode meaning in different ways through a specialized use of ‘‘lexicogrammar’’ (Gledhill, 2011). This particularly holds true in advanced academic writing, such as RAs, in which what matters is experience and expertise in a disciplinary domain rather than nativeness (Römer and Arbor, 2009). In addition, when writing academic texts, student writers and researchers in various academic fields tend to make use of non-discipline-specific discourse (Aull and Lancaster, 2014; Crosthwaite et al., 2017). This general style of writing adopted by student writers in various disciplines including education-related fields can be attributed to a lack of phraseological knowledge required to write in a given genre such as research article particularly the discussion section (Le and Harrington, 2015). Therefore, the present research investigates the key p-frames in the discussion section of RAs of higher education. Extant ESP research has paid little attention to recurrent multiword units in the academic writing of education-related genres. Moreover, Sword (2009) has indicated that getting engaged with published research and undertaking and reporting one's own research is a serious challenge in the field of higher education. Providing a list of key p-frames in the discussion section of RAs in the field of higher education, this study can extend the current literature on lists of frequent formulaic expressions in academic genres, and also offer a help for these students and researchers struggling with research in their discipline. The reason that the discussion section has been selected as the focus of this study is its salient role in RAs in social and behavioral disciplines, as it is the place where the authors interpret their findings and explicate the contribution of their research to the theory and practice in a discipline. Swales and Feak (2012) have asserted that writing the discussion section is more challenging for student writers and researchers, and students and researchers in the field of education may not be an exception. Swales and Feak have also argued that this section tends to be more integrated with the field. Therefore, the list of p-frames identified in this research will be beneficial for student writers and researchers in the field of higher education by helping them to make their discussion more aligned and integrated with the target readers’ expectations (Martinez and Schmitt, 2012). It should be taken into account that the students and researchers in this disciplinary domain, particularly those who have learned English in an EFL/ESL context, can benefit from this phraseological list. Consequently, this list can be considered for inclusion in the materials prepared for academic writing courses for higher education majors. This study hopes to provide academic writing instructors, and students in higher education a richer understanding of the discussion section of RAs in this disciplinary domain and the language used in this specific genre using p-frame as the unit of analysis. This kind of analysis is in line with text-based and practice-based approaches to academic writing. The former emphasizes the discipline-specific nature of academic writing by relying on linguistic features of a particular genre or register, while the latter puts emphasis on the fact that practices associated with a specific genre and register are social and discursive (Baynham, 2000). This study extends the application of keyness to p-frames (e.g., a blended/collaborative/ virtual/technologically-charged learning environment) in order to find out the phraseological distinctiveness of the discussion section of RAs in the domain of higher education. Providing a precise linguistic account of this genre by identifying its frequent p-frames can be an effective means for familiarizing the students of higher education with the typical discursive practices associated with their field of study.

2. Literature review 2.1. Phraseology in ESP Corpus-based attempts to establish lists of pedagogically relevant academic phraseological items have recently attracted EAP researchers’ attention. Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) provided a list of formulaic sequences, called the Academic Formulaic List (AFL), for academic writing and speech. This list is composed of phraseological units of three to five words, classified into three functional categories, namely referential, stance, and discourse organizers (see Section 3.2.4). They demonstrated that experienced ESL and EAP instructors consider those phraseological items that have a higher frequency and a higher mutual information index (the degree to which words are bound together) to be more Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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formulaic, have a clear function, and have greater pedagogical worth. It should be noted that the use of MI scores to deal with multi-word sequences is problematic for two reasons (Biber, 2009). First, this statistic does not take into account the order of words in a sequence and considers the expected frequency of all the possible combination of words in a sequence. This makes the application of MI for formulaic sequences problematic as they are characterized by fixed word order. Second, formulaic sequences are composed of both content and function words; however, MI excludes function words from analysis because it disfavors sequences containing high-frequency words such as function words. Two years later, Martinez and Schmitt (2012) developed a list of 505 frequent, non-transparent formulaic sequences called the PHRASal Expressions List (PHRASE List). The 2--4 word bundles of this list were grouped into those more representative of speech and writing, and were divided into frequency bands. Ackermann and Chen (2013) developed the Academic Collocations List (ACL) from the written component of the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE) consisting of textbook chapters and journal articles representing 28 disciplines. Combining the findings of corpus linguistics with expert evaluation, they proposed a list of 2468 collocational items that merit pedagogical attention. The final collocational entries belonged to four structural categories, namely noun combinations (e.g., assessment process, target audience), verb and noun/adjective combinations (e.g., gather information, consider appropriate), verb and adverb combinations (e.g., vary considerably, previously mentioned), and adverb+adjective combinations (e.g., highly controversial, markedly different). However, this list of academic collocations was not classified in accordance with semantic fields or discourse functions. Hsu (2014)extracted opaque formulaic sequences from a corpus of 20 million words compiled from 200 EAP textbooks. The study purported to collect phraseological items frequently used in EAP textbooks prepared for non-English majors in order to enhance their reading comprehension. The focus of the study was those formulaic sequences that are semantically non-transparent phrases, the meaning of which differs from what their individual words denote. The final list of formulaic sequences consisted of 475 items of 2--5 words (e.g., in practice, in view of, a case in point), constituting around 2% of the College Textbook Corpus. Focusing on the phraseological items in the discussion section, Le and Harrington (2015) sought to identify word clusters used to comment on the results in the discussion sections of 124 RAs in applied linguistics. They positioned the phraseological units in the three steps of the commenting on results move, namely interpreting results (e.g., results suggest that/findings suggest that), comparing results (e.g., lend support to, lend support to the), and accounting for the results (e.g., a possible explanation, another possible explanation). The ESP corpus-informed research has recently made attempts to examine discipline-specific phraseology. Gilmore and Millar (2018) identified 3--6 lexical bundles from the Specialized Corpus of Civil Engineering Research Articles. Their final list consisted of 257 lexical bundles representing the language of civil engineering. The majority of these sequences were 3-word bundles and were research-oriented in terms of their discourse function. Gilmore and Millar (2018) suggested that functional frameworks established in the ESP literature are not sufficiently beneficial for the target learners; therefore, they classified the lexical bundles identified in their study into five categories that would be more meaningful for civil engineering students and ESP material developers. These categories included cause-and-effect bundles (e.g., due to the, as a function of), comparison and contrast bundles (e.g., as well as, at the same time), quantifying sequences (e.g., the amount of, the value of), deictic sequences (e.g., the presence of, in this paper), and stance bundles (e.g., the fact that, is assumed to be). Nevertheless, since they did not apply keyness to their phraseological investigation, many of the bundles Gilmore and Millar introduced in their article could not be claimed to be distinctive of civil engineering RAs. Another study in this line of research is Green and Lambert (2019) proposing the Secondary Phrase List (SPL) developed from a 16-million corpus of secondary school texts in eight disciplines, consisting of only two-word phraseological items. In addition to frequency, range, dispersion, and mutual information, they also considered part of speech as their criteria for the inclusion of the phrases in SPL. They stated that noun-noun, verb-noun, noun-verb, adjective-noun, and verb-adverb combinations are more representative of disciplinary language. Green and Lambert also subjected the phrases meeting their objective criteria to subjective evaluation for pedagogical usefulness. They found, for instance, the most frequent noun-noun phrase in their corpus is topic sentence, while the most frequently occurring noun-verb phrase is writer uses.

2.2. Phrase frames and related ESP research In order to examine prefabrication or formulaic language, a wide range of units has been proposed by different researchers in different disciplines. However, a convenient unit of analysis should tap into important features of formulaic language such as fixedness, frequency of occurrence, and pattern variability. According to Forsyth and Grabowski (2015), p-frame is a suitable candidate since this unit allows the researchers to account for not only the frequency of recurrent sequences of words, but also their fixedness and pattern variability in order to explore the degree of formulaicity of a text. Indeed, the p-frame can potentially provide a more thorough understanding of the formulaic nature of language (Cunningham, 2017). Given that different parts of a text prioritize different p-frames (Grabowski, 2015), it is possible to gain insight into those p-frames distinctive of a particular register such as the discussion section of RAs. According to Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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Römer (2010), ‘‘phrase frames are sets of n-grams which are identical except for one word’’ (p. 98). Unlike continuous sequences of words like lexical bundles which are considered as invariable chunks of language such as ‘‘I don’t know if’’, p-frames are regarded as a discontinuous sequence of words with a variable slot (Gray and Biber, 2013). For example, the p-frame at the * of has a slot which can be filled by various words such as end, beginning, and turn. The choice of p-frame as the unit of analysis has some advantages. By examining phraseological frames, their variants, and their pattern variability, it is possible to differentiate between productive p-frames and unproductive ones. This enables the researchers to gain greater understanding of the degree of formulaicity of a text (Biber, 2009; Römer, 2009; Forsyth and Grabowski, 2015). Besides, as Cunningham (2017) noted, the fillers that can be used in a p-frame may vary across different text types and genres. For example, the fillers of a particular frame like at the * of which include end, beginning, and turn might reveal semantic relationships in a given context. If students are given the chance to understand the forms and functions of such p-frames, they are more likely to gain specialized knowledge of ‘‘. . . how the language works and what expectations certain linguistic forms bring’’ (p. 73). The functional classification of such frames can help students understand the communicative purposes of a text, thus facilitating a more profound understanding of a particular corpus, genre, or register (Cunningham, 2017; Fuster-Márquez and Pennock-Speck, 2015; Grabowski, 2015; Römer, 2010). Additionally, a collection of technical p-frames in a particular genre can be used as query words and phrases for search purposes, thus enabling writers and researchers to spot their target papers more easily and more effectively (Win and Masada, 2015). Along similar lines, Römer and Arbor (2009) argued that a p-frame analysis of expert and apprentice academic writing can reveal those specific items belonging to expert academic inventory of recurrent multi-word units which are in need of special attention in academic writing courses. In sum, the use of these phraseological sequences as the unit of analysis in corpus-based studies is an integral part of creating the phraseological profile of a text (Römer, 2010). In the field of ESP, some recent attempts have been made to investigate p-frames in specific genres and registers. In contrast to the mainstream approach of identifying and presenting the most frequent or salient phraseological items in a corpus, Vincent (2013) adopted a different method by identifying phrasal cores (e.g., the * of), which are combinations of frequent words (typically functional words), and their collocates that are specific lexical sets (in this example: end, number, concept) in an EAP text and then checking them in a reference corpus (the usacard subcorpus of the Bank of English). The reference corpus was consulted in order to determine whether the phrasal cores and their collocates are commonly used in academic English, find other realizations of the phrasal cores conveying similar meanings, and ensure that they meet a minimum frequency cut-off. Vincent suggested that the functions of the phraseological items, their distinctiveness of the academic genre, and learners’ proficiency level can be the criteria to assess the pedagogical value of these phrasal cores. Grabowski (2015) investigated the use, structure, and discourse functions of four-word p-frames in four different pharmaceutical text types, namely academic textbooks, summaries of product characteristics, clinical trial protocols, and patient information leaflets. The general pattern emerging from the data was that there were considerable variations in the use, structure and discourse functions of the p-frames across these four text types. Grabowski has attributed these variations to the users, contexts, and functions of each of these text types and also to different conventions of the structure of their genres. There is a relatively small body of literature concerned with the frequency, structure, and functions of p-frames in different sections of RAs. Cunningham (2017) identified key p-frames in 128 RAs of mathematics. One hundred and eighty p-frames satisfying the criteria set for frequency, range, and keyness were further subject to structural and functional analysis. A criticism that could be leveled upon the methodology used in the aforementioned study to identify key phraseological frames is that only n-grams occurring at least three times were taken into account. Consequently, the p-frames with variants less frequent than three and also the less frequent variants of frames were removed from the analysis. Overcoming this methodological shortcoming, Lu et al. (2018) targeted a corpus of RA introductions in six disciplinary domains (philosophy, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, economics, and applied linguistics) to identify five-word and six-word p-frames. The final list consisted of 370 five-word and 84 six-word frames. It was found that the majority of five-word p-frames were other content word frames (e.g., a brief account/description/overview of the), whereas the biggest proportion of the six-word frames were verb-based (e.g., the aim/purpose/goal of this article is). Moreover, the functional analysis revealed that referential frames ( focus on the role/effect of) dominated other functional categories among five-word items, while discourse organizing units (e.g., the article is structured/organized as follows) were the largest functional category among six-word frames. An exploration of p-frames can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the phraseological profile of a particular text type (Römer, 2010). In line with other phraseological and corpus-based studies, the present study will also utilize the common measures of frequency and range for characterizing p-frames in a corpus of RA discussions in the field of higher education. A new measure for characterizing p-frames used by Cunningham (2017), namely, keyness, will also be used. Keyness denotes particular language items that are unusually frequent in a particular domain, text, register, or genre, which can be identified through comparison with a reference corpus. Similarly, key p-frames refer to those

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discipline-, genre-, or text-specific sequences whose identification provide a greater understanding of those frames distinctive of a given text type. In light of these explanations, the present study purports to answer the following questions: 1. What are key four-word and five-word p-frames in the discussion section of RAs in the field of higher education? 2. What is the distribution of these four-word and five-word p-frames across the structural categories? 3. What is the distribution of these four-word and five-word p-frames across the functional groups?

3. Methods 3.1. Corpus The corpus used in this study consisted of the discussion sections of 422 RAs taken from 13 high-ranking journals of higher education. The corpus was comprised of 503,877 words. In order to select the journals, the Education and Educational Research category of the Journal Citation Reports released in 2017 was consulted. The 13 top journals specialized in the field of higher education were selected. The first journal selected was Internet and Higher Education, and the thirteenth one was Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. The impact factor of the journals ranged from 5.84 to 1.21. From each journal, articles published from 2013 to 2017 were considered. Since the focus of this study is on phraseological items in the discussion section of RAs, only those articles having a separate section entitled ‘‘Discussion’’ were chosen and the articles having sections such as ‘‘Results and Discussion’’ and ‘‘Discussion and conclusion’’ were not included in the corpus. In addition, extra care was exercised to include only RAs that are organized in the following order: Introduction, Method, Results/Findings, Discussion, and Conclusion (alternative, but similar, titles for the final section were also possible). Moreover, RAs with an empirical methodology were included and the discussion section of meta-analysis, review, and theoretical publications were excluded from the corpus. Four hundred and forty-two RAs were selected and their discussion sections were subjected to further analysis. Table 1 reports the number of articles and the total number of words of the discussion sections taken from each journal.

3.2. Procedure The procedure involved four main stages. First, taking a bottom-up approach, we initially identified all p-frames in the corpus. Next, in order to reduce the large number of frames, the frequency and the cut-off point were employed. Then, measures of keyness were run to come up with key p-frames in this discipline-specific corpus. This was possible by comparing the frequency of the frames in higher education journals to a reference corpus. Having identified key p-frames, we finally examined them in terms of structure and function.

Table 1 The make-up of the corpus. Journal

No. of texts

Word count

Internet and Higher Education Studies in Higher Education The Journal of Higher Education Higher Education Research and Development Active Learning in Higher Education Higher Education Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education Research in Higher Education Journal of Computing in Higher Education Teaching in Higher Education Review of Higher Education Journal of Diversity in Higher Education Total

35 36 38 35 32 34 32 30 33 28 31 28 30 422

42,912 42,525 46,024 43,814 36,730 38,127 40,145 35,354 39,015 31,128 36,665 36,179 35,259 503,877

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3.2.1. Identification of p-frames After the corpus was compiled, the p-frames were extracted using kfNgram (Fletcher, 2012), a computer program capable of extracting lists of n-grams of varying lengths from a particular corpus. However, in this study, only 4-word and 5word n-grams were extracted. The rationale behind choosing n-grams of size four is that most studies conducted on pframes have focused on 4-word units (Grabowski, 2015; Römer, 2010). The inclusion of 5-gram units, on the other hand, allows the identification of those p-frames that are more semantically complex and more specific to a particular genre, register, or a text (Cunningham, 2017; Römer, 2009; Lu et al., 2018). In order to analyze all the variants of a p-frame, we set the floor as 1 in KfNgram. The generated n-grams at this stage were used to create lists of p-frames of length four and five. In this second step, kfNgram created p-frames by combining n-grams that were identical with only one variable slot. For example, the n-grams the end of the (24), the nature of the (23), the results of the (17) would generate the frame the * of the with a frequency of 64. After these four- and five-word p-frames were generated by the software, they were subjected to further manual examination. First, p-frames solely made up of proper names, symbols, years, and punctuation marks were excluded from further analysis. Second, sequences with a variable slot in the medial position were retained and those with variants at the beginning or end of the construction were removed. According to Garner (2016), the latter cannot be considered p-frames since they constitute lexical bundles. In case of 4-word frames, an attempt was made to detect overlap by examining the list of 5-word frames. For example, the p-frames, may be * likely and be * likely to were found to belong to the same 5-word frame may be * likely to. 3.2.2. Frequency and range criteria Frequency threshold and range criteria were two additional steps taken in order to proceed with further data reduction. Regarding frequency, the raw frequency of each p- frame was recorded. Then, it was normed to one million words, and only those frames meeting a frequency threshold of 20 occurrences per million words, i.e., 8 in this corpus, were retained for further analysis which involved keyness. As for the range, following Cunningham (2017), frames identified in the previous stages had to appear in 75% the journals used in the corpus. The range identification was run in AntConc 3.2.4m (Anthony, 2014) by searching the 13 files related to the 13 journals compiled in this study separately and analyzing the dis plots. 3.2.3. Identification of key p-frames The last step of the data reduction involved identification of key p- frames by searching for those frames distinctive of higher education journals. To this aim, the normed frequency of each frame was compared to its normed frequency in the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE), a corpus of proficient, university students’ writing with around 6.5 million words from 30 different disciplines. Following Cunningham (2017), those p-frames whose frequencies were higher in the reference corpus were removed from further analysis. Specifically, this comparison was carried out using the symmetric mean absolute percentage error (sMAPE) which involves ‘‘the difference of the two values over the average of the two values’’ (Cunningham, 2017, p. 75). The mathematical translation of this definition involves: (Higher Education -BAWE)/((Higher Education + BAWE)/2). The maximum value of sMAPE is 2, provided the frequency of the frames in the reference corpus is not zero. In the current study, the threshold sMAPE score of 1.95 was used in order to choose only those p-frames that had approximately 100 times more occurrences in the higher education corpus than in BAWE. The resulting frames reaching this threshold score were further tested with Fisher's exact test to ensure that a significant difference exists between the two corpora. Those p-frames that met these criteria were retained for further structural and functional analysis. It was found that all the key p-frames having a sMAPE score of 1.95 or above also passed the Fisher's exact test. 3.2.4. Structural and functional analysis of p- frames Structural analysis involved examining the types of words that constitute each frame. Following Gray and Biber (2013), we used the three-way classification system for structural analysis: 1. Verb based frames: frames consisting of at least one type of verb including modal, auxiliary, or main verbs (e.g. students were * to). 2. Frames containing non-verb content words such as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (e.g. the * of learning). 3. Frames solely containing function words including prepositions, determiners, pronouns, etc. (e.g. about the * of). As the last step in the analysis of p-frames, their discourse functions were examined by investigating the concordance lines for each frame, making it possible to determine the use of each p-frame in context. Although it is possible that a frame would perform different functions in a text based on the words filling the variable slot, most of the Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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realizations of a frame in this study had the same function. On the other hand, since adopting a variant-based approach to the functional coding of a p-frame makes its function dependent on the function of its most frequent filler(s) or on the semantics of the longer left-hand or right-hand context of the p-frame, Grabowski (2015) suggested that the functional assignment of p-frames, as a different construct from lexical bundles, can be based on a fixed-frame approach, in which its fixed components rather than the semantic features of its fillers and/or a longer stretch of discourse would be the basis of functional labeling. Specifically, for functional analysis, the classification system used for phraseological items by Biber et al. (2004) was employed, which include referential constructions, stance frames, and discourse organizing expressions Referential frames characterize physical or abstract entities as well as textual context by identifying and describing some of their attributes (e.g. the * learning environment). Stance frames suggest the writer's attitude or assessment of certainty with regard to the proposition made in the text (e.g. are * likely to withdraw). Relationships between different parts of the text can be expressed through discourse organizing frames (e.g. on the * hand). 4. Results 4.1. The most frequent p-frames The initial criteria for p-frames to be included in the analysis were to occur at least 20 times per million words in the corpus, to be present in at least 10 of the 13 journals investigated in this study, and to have a sMAPE value of 1.95 and p < 0.0001 on Fisher's exact test. Overall, 58 four-word p-frames and 40 five-word p-frames satisfied these criteria. The variable slots in all these discontinuous sequences were in the medial position. Table 2 demonstrates the 20 most frequent four-word p-frames, accompanied by their frequency in the corpus, and some of their fillers and their frequencies. Based on Table 2, to the * of, with 268 occurrences, is the most frequent 4-word p-frame in the corpus of the discussion section of RAs in higher education. The most frequent filler of this p-frame is development with a frequency of 13. In other words, the sequence to the development of is the most frequent realization of this p-frame. To the use of, to the importance of, to the needs of, and to the success of are other instances of this p-frame. Another four-word phraseological sequence, occurring 106 times in this corpus, is the * of students, which is filled by words such as majority (the majority of students), success (the success of students), needs (the needs of students), and level (the level of students). As demonstrated in Table 2 and also in Appendix A, these four-word p-frames reflect a wide range of issues in the field of higher education, such as students (the population/interaction/level of students -- students are able/expected/qualified/socialized to -students were considered/encouraged/allowed to), learning (the management/regulation/value/process of learning -- in online/collaborative/traditional/graded learning environment), feedback (the provision/quality/sources/timeliness of feedback), assessment (the role/culture/method/consequences of assessment -- the assessment of learning), and diversity (the benefits/influence/lack of diversity). Table 3 reports the 20 most frequent five-word p-frames and some of their selected fillers. Table 3 demonstrates that in the * of the, with a frequency of 48 in the corpus, is the most frequent five-word p-frame. Different realizations of this p-frame include in the case of the, in the context of the, in the hands of the, and in the nature of the. The second most frequent five-word p-frame is the * of higher education, which is filled by words such as field (the field of higher education), context (the context of higher education), and quality (the quality of higher education). Another example with just two filler types is video use * higher education. Interestingly, both of these two fillers, i.e., in (video use in teacher education) and across (video use across teacher education), are prepositions. Taking a deeper look at the list of top 20 most frequent five-word p-frames, shown in Table 3, and the 40 remaining ones provided in Appendix B, indicates a number of topics such as online learning (the context/flexibility/effectiveness/implementation of online learning), peer evaluation (the validity/quality/benefits of peer evaluation), financial issues (the distribution/amount/availability of financial aid -- capital spending/outlays/needs for higher education), and dual enrollment (the influence/magnitude/contribution of dual enrolment). 4.2. Structural analysis To examine the structure of the phraseological items identified in this research, we put them in three groups in accordance with the type of words appearing in the sequence. According to Table 4, non-verb content word phraseological items dominate both 4-word and 5-word p-frames, with 83.9% and 76.8% respectively. In addition, in both four-word and five-word phraseological sequences, verb-based frames were the second most frequent groups, constituting 11.30% and 13.90% of the p-frames respectively. Moreover, function word frames turned out to be the least frequent group in both four-word and five-word phraseological items. Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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Table 2 The 20 most frequent four-word p-frames and some selected fillers. P-frame

F

Most frequent fillers and their frequencies

to the * of

268

about the * of

107

the * of students

106

are more * to

82

at the * level

61

students were * to

49

the * of teaching

47

were more * to the * of learning

42 42

students are * to

39

the * of feedback

34

the * of knowledge

33

the * of education

29

have the * to

29

the * of diversity

28

the * of assessment

24

in * learning environments

24

in the * environment

22

in the * context

22

the * benefits of

17

development (13) use (12) importance (7) lack (6) results (6) kinds (5) level (5) needs (5) success (5) benefits (19) quality (7) use (7) role (5) purposes (4) extent (3) effects (3) importance (3) impact (3) fairness (3) majority (12) number (9) percentage (6) role (4) success (3) impact (3) population (3) needs (3) interaction (2) level (2) likely (66) sensitive (3) difficult (2) inclined (2) senior (1) resilient (1) able (1) transferable (1) specific (1) averse (1) institutional (15) individual (10) group (5) student (5) departmental (4) program (2) national (2) course (2) instructor (2) state (2) considered (18) able (6) asked (5) required (4) encouraged (3) found (3) socialized (2) unable (2) activated (1) allowed (1) quality (8) context (4) understanding (3) concept (2) levee (1) process (1) support (1) conceptualization (1) future (1) likely (39) prone (1) motivated (1) hesitant (1) management (6) regulation (4) assessment (3) monitoring (2) value (2) quality (2) process (2) goal (1) efficiency (1) able (7) likely (5) required (3) expected (3) willing (3) left (2) unable (2) qualified (1) socialized (1) confident (1) provision (5) quality (4) kinds (3) impact (2) source (2) use (2) timeliness (1) role (1) absence (1) amount (1) pursuit (3) lack (3) construction (2) traditional (2) source (2) transmission (2) positioning (1) organization (1) rule (1) production (1) application (1) department (5) purposes (4) field (2) institute (2) pursuit (2) discipline (2) science (1) quality (1) philosophy (1) potential (15) opportunity (4) ability (3) skills (2) power (2) tools (1) courage (1) motivation (1) benefits (18) influence (2) level (2) impact (2) value (1) lack (1) importance (1) issue (1) role (4) impact (3) culture (2) kinds (1) nature (1) possibility (1) method (1) consequences (1) effectiveness (1) online (12) collaborative (5) problem-based (1) traditional (1) SMT-driven (1) mobile (1) graded (1) face-to-face (1) online (8) virtual (3) ODL (2) institutional (1) physical (1) constructed (1) college (1) educational (1) academic (3) present (2) online (2) university (2) overall (1) social (1) contemporary (1)broader (1) educational (1) net (6) personal (4) cognitive (2) learning (1) educational (1), labor-market (1) associative (1)

Some instances of four-word p-frames across each structural category are as follows. The boldface words are example fillers of the p-frames. A. Verb-based p-frames are more likely/sensitive/inclined to compared to white/male/female/online students assess the level/readiness/progress of B. Other content word p-frames a blended/collaborative/safe/virtual learning environment the gender gap/differences/balance in the use/adoption/support/integration of technology C. Function word p-frames to the development/success/enhancement of about the benefits/fairness/costs of

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Table 3 The 20 most frequent five-word p-frames and some selected fillers. P-frame

F

Most frequent fillers and their frequencies

in the * of the

48

the * of higher education

37

the * of online learning

34

the * of peer evaluation

29

about the * of diversity the * of financial aid

18 17

video use * teacher education capital * for higher education the * of the course

18 16 16

male and female * students students are * likely to aware of the * of

14 14 14

the * of the students

14

the * of the learning

13

students are more * to for the * of the

13 13

may be more * to

12

the level of * of

12

because of the * of

12

the * of dual enrollment

12

case (6) context (5) direction (3) form (3) end (3) hands (2) nature (2) value (1) location (1) field (4) context (3) quality (3) effect (2) purpose (2) rigors (2) study (2) transformation (1) globalization (1) direction (1) context (3) flexibility (3) effectiveness (2) effects (2) merit (2) tendency (2) construct (2) study (2) implementation (1) modalities (1) validity (9) quality (2) benefits (2) power (1) methods (1) strategies (1) complexity (1) mechanisms (1) types (1) benefits (16) lack (1) importance (1) effects (4) distribution (2) amount (1) availability (1) likelihood (1) in (17) across (1) spending (7) outlays (5) expenditures (3) needs (1) end (7) nature (2) beginning (2) usefulness (1) topic (1) middle (1) sport (13) graduate (1) more (9) less (3) not (2) level (2) power (1) nature (1) rules (1) complexity (1) benefits (1) implications (1) use (1) role (3) views (2) mass (1) skills (1) diversity (1) development (1) heterogeneity (1) inequality (1) nature (3) location (2) quality (1) self-regulation (1) context (1) expansion *1) likely (9) inclined (2) sensitive (2) averse (2) effectiveness (2) majority (2) self-regulation (1) development (1) benefits (1) fate (1) realization (1) likely (6) inclined (1) reactive (1) generative (1) apt (1) eager (1) critical (1) preparedness (6) specify (2) significance (1) complexity (1) diversity (2) pervasiveness (1) laws (1) issue (1) self-reporting (1) confusion (1) integration (1) individuality (1) specificity (1) difficulties (1) influence (6) number (1) magnitude (1) contribution (1) performance (1)

Table 4 The distribution of 4-word and 5-word phraseological items across the structural categories.

4-word p-frames 5-word p-frames

Verb-based frames

Other content word frames

Function word frames

11.30% 13.90%

83.90% 76.80%

4.80% 9.30%

The following are some examples of five-word p-frames from these three structural categories: A. Verb-based p-frames are less/more likely to withdraw students who are qualified/required/unable to considered to be poorly/very prepared

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Table 5 The distribution of 4-word and 5-word phraseological items across the functional categories.

4-word p-frames 5-word p-frames

Referential

Stance

Discourse

91.3% 70%

8.7% 27.5%

0% 2.5%

B. Other content word p-frames student and staff perceptions/rankings of the validity/quality/benefits of peer feedback student voice/learning/engagement in higher education C. Function word p-frames for the effectiveness/majority/self-regulation of the in the case/context/direction of the

4.3. Functional analysis The distribution of the 4-word and 5-word p-frames across the three functional categories proposed by Biber et al. (2004) are reported in Table 5. It has been found that the majority of both four-word and five-word phraseological sequences in this corpus are referential p-frames, with 91.3% and 70% respectively. In an online/ODL/e-learning/ evaluative environment and the nature/quality/self-regulation of the learning are two examples for this type of four-word and five-word p-frames respectively. Stance expressions (8.7%), like students are able/unable/ to, were the second most frequent p-frames in four-word constructions. The same functional category ranked second, with a larger proportion (27.5%), in the five-word p-frames (e.g., are less/more likely to withdraw). Finally, there were no instances of discourse expressions among the four-word p-frames and only one (2.5%) among the five-word ones (because of the persuasiveness/issue/specificity of). The following section provides four-word and five-word examples from each of the functional categories. In addition, we have tried to enrich the explanation in light of the subcategories of these three function types. The largest functional group found in this study is referential frames. For instance, the p-frame the * of feedback is a referential expression, and different fillers of this frame (e.g., provision, quality, and impact) refer to different attributes or aspects of this concept. Examples 1 and 2 specify two different attributes of feedback. Therefore, they belong to the specification of attributes subcategory of referential expressions. (1) The abovementioned barriers for using feedback all relate to the provision of feedback and can be amended by the teacher to a large extent . . . (2) Earlier work suggests the need to improve the quality of feedback to students in higher education with implications for the redesigning of curricula. Examples 3 and 4 exhibit the same fictional subcategory of referential p-frames among five-word sequences, specifying two different attributes of online learning. (3) . . . peer learning should also be prioritized in the context of online learning despite the borderline statistical significance obtained in this review for this relationship. (4) Some students with family and childcare obligations report that without u flexibility of online learning, they would take fewer courses each semester. Another subcategory of referential p-frames observed in this study is deictic and locatives. An example from fourword p-frames is in the * classroom, filled by words such as traditional, flipped, and college. Examples 5 and 6 show how this referential sequence describe the location of learning. In example 5 there is also another phraseological sequence (in the online environment) belonging to the same functional subcategory. It is a realization of the p-frame in the * environment. (5) While this technique seems to be useful in the traditional classroom, it appears to be less useful in the online environment. (6) Students in the flipped classroom performed as well, but not significantly better, than students following traditional lectures. Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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(7)

(8)

(9) (10)

11

The second functional category investigated in this study is stance expressions. The p-frame are * likely to withdraw, having more and less as its only two fillers, is a stance expression with a hedging subfunction. Example 7 illustrates this p-frame in which the probability of withdrawing for education students with the specified conditions has been mitigated. For education majors, students are less likely to withdraw if they are seniors or if they have need-based grants. Epistemic stance is another subcategory of stance expressions concerned with the way writers communicate their mode of knowledge. The p-frame considered to be * prepared is an instance of an epistemic stance expression, filled with poorly and very. Example 8 demonstrates a realization of this frame. Although no consistent pattern could be seen amongst the competencies for which students were considered to be poorly prepared, many of them involved activities such as planning, analyzing, critiquing, and evaluating. The p-frame less likely to * in is a stance expression belonging to the ability/possibility subcategory. The fillers of this p-frame include participate, engage, and enroll. The possibility of each of these actions is expressed by the sequence less likely. Examples 9 and 10 show how this p-frame is realized in this corpus. Furthermore, dual enrollees were less likely to participate in remediation than non-dual enrollees, which is also consistent with past research. Students reported that they were less likely to enroll in online or blended courses that covered the more advanced topics.

5. Discussion and conclusion The current study is a first step to develop a phraseological profile of the RAs in the field of higher education by producing a list of key four-word and five-word p-frames in the discussion section of these articles. This list consists of 58 four-word and 40 five-word key p-frames that have high frequency in this genre. Preparing a list of p-frames for the RAs of mathematics, Cunningham (2017) has stated that such discipline-specific target phraseological frames can help students and researchers understand how language works in a disciplinary discourse. Presenting a list of key pframes for the discussion section of RAs in the field of higher education is an attempt to fill the gap related to the scarcity of p-frame lists and the perceived pedagogical importance of such resources for EAP writing discussed by Lu et al. (2018) who have developed a list of p-frames from the introduction section of RAs in six social science disciplines. The results of this study also revealed that content word phraseological frames such as in * learning environment and the * of higher education dominate both four-word and five-word constructions explored in this project. This is partially supported by the findings of Biber (2009) in which noun phrase (NP) or prepositional phrase (PP) sequences were demonstrated to be more frequent than verb-based and dependent clause bundles in academic texts. This finding is also supported by those of Lu et al. (2018) demonstrating that the majority of the p-frames in a corpus of the RA introductions were made up of other content words. However, this outcome could not support those of Gray and Biber (2013) and Cunningham (2017) who demonstrated that function word and verb-based frames dominate other structural categories in their corpora respectively. The academic subcorpus used in Gray and Biber (2013) consisted of academic books and RAs and the corpus Cunningham (2017) has used was composed of the whole texts of RAs in mathematics. Apart from possible disciplinary variations, neither of these two studies have focused on a specific section of RAs, i.e., the discussion section, which might have caused this inconsistency. The current study also found that referential function outnumbered the other functional categories in both fourword and five-word phraseological frames. In other words, identifying attributes of an abstract entity turn out to be the most frequent function of discontinuous multi-word constructions in the discussion of RAs of higher education. This is in line with the results of previous work on the discourse functions of multiword constructions in academic writing (Biber et al., 2004; Chen and Baker, 2010; Lu et al., 2018). Serving this function enables these formulaic frames to frame informational content, a considerable function in academic writing. In addition to investigating the p-frames in terms of their main functional categories, an attempt was made to analyze the phraseological sequences with respect to the subcategories of these functional groups. This kind of functional information can encourage the incorporation of the multiword constructions identified in this study into academic writing courses for education students and researchers. The key phraseological frames identified in this research can assist material developers to produce materials with a focus on this particular discipline's phraseology. The importance of incorporating the phraseology of a particular discipline into ESP materials has been stressed by previous research (Gilmore and Millar, 2018; Hyland, 2002; Vincent, 2013). Specifically, Vincent (2013) has suggested that an advantage of using p-frames for teaching EAP phraseology would be an increase of exposure to a language item by offering a number of its instances to the learners. Therefore, using EAP materials incorporating discontinuous frames and their fillers enables instructors to present more language items and at Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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the same time to reduce the cognitive burden education students may face, because retrieving formulaic language from long-term memory could be less cognitively taxing than constructing them from the outset (Kuiper, 1996). This processing ease may be even more tangible when students are provided with a phraseological frame rather than mere lexical bundles, a suggestion that should be substantiated in future empirical research. Targeted writing materials, equipped with this discipline's key phraseology, can be prepared for student writers. These materials can have tasks and activities drawing students’ attention to discipline-specific formulaic items and their discourse functions. Writing activities triggering noticing and deep processing of these language chunks can ease the acquisition and internalization of these items (Boers and Lindstromberg, 2009). The key p-frames identified in this study can also facilitate academic writing instruction in this field of study. Student writers and researchers in the field of higher education need to be sensitive to the phraseological items frequent in their discipline and also their structural and functional nuances. Previous scholarship on the acquisition of formulaic language confirmed that simple exposure to these items in texts fails to ensure that they are acquired or even noticed; students should become aware of the importance of formulaic sequences, particularly those that are specific to their disciplinary community (Cortes, 2004; Meunier, 2002). It has been demonstrated that explicit pedagogical attention to useful language features of a genre enhances students’ awareness of that genre (Lo and Jeong, 2018). Hatami (2015) asserted that awareness raising is the most crucial responsibility language teachers may shoulder with regard to teaching formulaic sequences. One technique Meunier (2002) introduced to make student writers more aware of formulaic items is concordance. In general, EAP instructors should clarify to students that these phraseological items are as crucial as individual words for their fluent language production. Gaining mastery and using these key p-frames in order to write the discussion and other sections of RAs can help students and researchers in the field of higher education show their respect for the conventions of their discourse community and hence, signal their effective membership in their discipline. These target phraseological units suggest the way knowledge is framed in the discourse community of higher education, familiarity with which, as Hyland (2002) proposed, is crucial for understanding the written discourse in this disciplinary community. This will help student writers, who have been found not to be sufficiently familiar with discourse conventions of their discipline in previous research (Ackerley, 2017; Lillis, 2001; Swales and Feak, 2012), make their writing better aligned with their intended readers’ expectations (Martinez and Schmitt, 2012). In addition, providing higher education students with this phraseological knowledge can facilitate their engagement with research in this field of study and also writing their own research reports, the problem prevalent among researchers and students in this discipline (Sword, 2009). Moreover, as Römer and Arbor (2009) rightly pointed out, what seems to matter in advanced academic writing is not nativeness but experience and expertise. Since both native and non-native student writers are regarded as equally novice with respect to academic writing (Wingate, 2012), both native and non-native student writers in this disciplinary domain need to learn the language and phraseology of academic writing by drawing on the findings of corpus-based studies such as key n-grams in the discussion section of RAs of higher education. The list of key p-frames in the discussion section of RAs of higher education can be especially useful for genrebased pedagogy focused on teaching how to write RAs as this pedagogical approach shows student writers in this field of study the phraseological frames naturally occurring in this genre, helping them avoid overusing, underusing, or misusing these disciplinary frames. Learning their disciplinary phraseology will be beneficial for student writers because, as Biber (2009) and Martinez and Schmitt (2012) suggested, it is a facilitating factor for their writing practice since these sequences are regarded as a key ingredient of proficient academic writing (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2002; Martinez and Schmitt, 2012). The present research focused on the key p-frames in the discussion section of RAs of higher education. Further studies may examine target phraseological items in other sections of RAs in this field and other fields of study. In addition, future research can explore this issue further by examining key p-frames of the rhetorical moves and steps of the discussion section of RAs in different fields of study, which requires a far larger corpus than the one compiled for this study. In addition, the semantic contribution of different slot fillers of a frame in academic writing can be the object of future corpus-based research. Such analysis can be strengthened by calculating inter-rater agreement for the semantic and functional analysis, which could not be conducted in the present study. Further, ESP instructors’ and students’ evaluation of the pedagogical usefulness of the p-frames identified in this research may merit further examination. Finally, interested researchers in the domains of education and higher education my also integrate the list of four-word and five-word pframes identified in this study into related academic writing programs and examine the effectiveness of these phraseological items on the students’ academic writing practice.

Conflict of interest The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804

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Appendix A List of key four-word p-frames on the discussion section of RAs of higher education. P-frame

Most frequent fillers

the * of technology a * learning environment

use, adoption, role, integration, support blended, collaborative, safe, virtual, well-resourced, career-oriented, well-resourced, simulated achievements, experiences, outcomes, opportunities, potential, objectives, benefits regulate, direct, self-monitor, strengthen, supplement, self-regulate, enhance, complete and, or gap, differences, balance encourage, allow, expect, convince, advise, require blended, collaborative, technologically-charged simulated, virtual middle, influence, size, nature, effects, concentration individual, overall, previous, lived, college, educational higher, doctoral lower-level, online, final, higher-level, white, male, other, female with, without success, community, use, systems, productivity, aspects, choice, planning, search, admission, enrollment online, ubiquitous, virtual, particular, active, best staff, instructor natural, social, soft, behavioral, hard tertiary, public, education. primary continued, progressive, professional, spiritual, social, academic, conscious, intellectual the, an level, readiness, progress, contributions, effects traditions, objectives, mission, routes, decisions, experience politics, perspectives, quality, spirit, aims, reality number, careers, status, underrepresentation, advancement higher, graduate, postsecondary, college feedback, review, assessment level, levels, lack attitudes, observations, perceptions, concerns, judgements, learning, assessment, overall, PDP, examination. development poorly, very, reasonably, policy, technological, tutor, theoretical, holistic, effects, preparations, work, role, panel, evaluation ODL, online, e-learning, academic, evaluative traditional, flipped, college, university, online for, on white, male, other, female, traditional, higher-placed

the learning * of to * their learning journaling * peer sharing the gender * in to * students to in a * learning the * of class the * experience of in the * education in the * course compared to * students first-year students * disabilities the academic * of the college * process the * learning environment student and * perceptions in the * sciences in the * sector the * development of at * individual level assess the * of the educational * of the * of university the * of women access to * education the peer * process the * of preparedness students’ * about the to the * process to be * prepared from a * perspective the * of teachers in an * environment in the * classroom spending * higher education than their * counterparts

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Appendix B List of key five-word p-frames on the discussion section of RAs of higher education. P-frames

Selected fillers

are * likely to withdraw the role of * in the use of * in the * of financial aid more likely to * in in a * learning environment the * in our study interactive usage of * LMS student and staff * of students who are * to student and * perceptions of members of the * community to * teaching and learning academic * and college readiness the validity of * evaluations the * of the students the * of the teacher considered to be * prepared dual enrollment * academic performance student * in higher education

less, more assessment, racism, narcissism, students, technology technology, video, OSN, ICTS, effects, distribution, mechanism, endogneity, amount, participate, succeed, enroll, attend blended, collaborative, technologically-charged, virtual, participants, students, respondents, instructors, courses, an, the perceptions, rankings qualified, required, unable, used, encouraged, shy staff, instructor learning, academic support, improve, align, performance, achievement peer, these majority, perspective, percentage, achievement, nature role, intervention, expertise poorly, very influences, and voice, learning, engagement, profiles, performance

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Please cite this article in press as: Golparvar, S.E., Barabadi, E., Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. Lingua (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102804