KPG research
A corpus-based research of candidates’ scripts concerning text grammar
Virginia-Maria Blani
PhD Thesis
Faculty of English Language and Literature
School of Philosophy
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The area of interest of this research is on the teaching and testing of writing in English. The proposed study will explore the Greek user’s performance in written English across the different levels of language proficiency as these are defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (henceforth CEFR). This research will focus on the analysis of candidates’ scripts produced in the writing module of the Greek State Certificate of English Language Proficiency (KPG). KPG writing assessment is based on three evaluation criteria. The first evaluation criterion deals with text content, genre, communicative purpose/mediation, register and style; the second with text grammar (text organization, coherence/ cohesion); and the third with sentence grammar and lexical features. This research will particularly focus on the second criterion, text grammar, which entails coherence and cohesion in text. The investigation of text grammar in candidates’ scripts and the comparative analysis of the findings (across language proficiency levels and across different writing tasks) will provide evidence on how text grammar (cohesion and coherence patterns) is realized in each of the genres candidates produce. Given the close relationship between text and context in the adopted genre-based approach, this research will attempt an analysis above the clause level, exploring the relations among different clauses, in order to investigate how text coherence is realized (Taboada and Mann, 2006a: 570). It is expected that findings from this research will provide an insight into how text grammar is realised in candidates’ scripts and will thus enrich the descriptions of candidates’ profile for different levels of language proficiency.