A multidimensional analysis of university students’ everyday reading and writing

Abstract Many studies have described primarily curricular and ideal forms of university student. Considerably fewer have focused on extracurricular and everyday/typical university student English writing. Describing this language may provide a different perspective of the target for EAP learners. Thus, the present study’s purpose is to describe the linguistic/functional nature of everyday American university student written language use by creating a Corpus of American University Student of Everyday written language (CAUSE) (580 texts, 405,954 words). Texts were collected from 53 students by eliciting all of their written language use. The texts were organized by register and Biber tagged. Texts and registers then underwent an additive multidimensional analysis and were mapped onto Biber’s (1988. Variation across speech and writing . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) original dimensions of variation. Doing so revealed that everyday university student reading is highly informational but that their writing is not, that their writing is also not highly narrative or overtly persuasive, and that texts that university students engage with are frequently different than typical texts from those registers, providing a more complete picture of the nature of university students’ language use. These findings have utility for EAP learners/teachers when considering university student language more holistically, beyond the ideal and curricular to also include the everyday.