What is literature, really? A corpus-driven study of students' statements

The purpose of the present study is to map the attitude of first-year university undergraduates regarding their conceptualization of literature. To this end, we resort to the analytical tools defined by Martin and Martin and Rose, which describe the language of appraisal in English from a systemic functional perspective. In order to establish a profile of students' patterns of appraisal, a mini learner corpus of student essays was first collected and subsequently digitized. The analysis was carried out by means of the computer software WordSmith Tools. This software extracted concordance lines displaying the word literature in the node position. Each concordance line was then manually labeled according to the analytical categories chosen for the present research. The distribution of the various categories in the students' texts suggests a utilitarian rather than an emotional stance towards literature.