Talking About How: Variation in the Use of HOW and Its Definition

This study identified the patterns that represent the unconventional ways that students used <em>how</em> in academic essays, determined the frequency of each pattern, and for the sake of comparison, searched for those patterns in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), in both the spoken and academic written registers. The results showed that a sample of first-year students at Central Washington University (CWU) used the complementizer <em>how</em> as <em>that</em> in their essays, a usage more common in spoken registers. However, there was some evidence of <em>how</em> as <em>that</em> in academic COCA searches, showing that the usage may be in the early stages of becoming acceptable by academic standards. Additionally, students misused <em>how</em> semantically in some sentences and misused <em>how</em> both semantically and syntactically in others. Finally, students also used <em>how</em> to mean <em>the fact/opinion that</em>. Students may have used <em>how</em> in these different ways because separating academic and spoken register conventions is difficult, because they lack an understanding of verb and prepositional complement patterns, or because they used synonyms provided by a thesaurus without realizing that the synonyms required different complement patterns.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

TESOL

Year dc:date.available

2018

Author dc:creator

• Jonas, Maili

Contributors dc:contributor

• Loretta Gray
• Charles X. Li
• Penglin Wang

• Applied linguistics
• complementizers
• corpus
• academic language
• COCA
• Adult and Continuing Education and Teaching
• Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education
• Language and Literacy Education
• Other Rhetoric and Composition

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/etd/877

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.cwu.edu:etd-1920