1 / 19

A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing

A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing. Susan Conrad Sarah Albers Department of Applied Linguistics Portland State University. Our Objectives for this Presentation. Share information about a resource you may want to use

laird
Download Presentation

A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing Susan Conrad Sarah Albers Department of Applied Linguistics Portland State University

  2. Our Objectives for this Presentation • Share information about a resource you may want to use • Encourage sharing among (American) universities with similar projects • Writing from all levels at the university, all departments Overview of the Presentation • Background on the project and Portland State • Current state of the corpus • Ongoing research & development; future plans

  3. Background: The “Viking Corpus” Project The beginnings • “Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching” class • Web announcement from M.A. student C. Gardes • Papers graded B or higher • Course, but no assignment info • Focused on immediate ESL teaching needs

  4. Project background continued… Realizations • More general use for PSU’s ESL program • The IELP: ~350 students. Common goal: enter PSU • New interest in innovations in curriculum & materials, corpus linguistics • Potential usefulness in other contexts • Other ESL programs • PSU more generally • Diversity: non-traditional students • “University Studies” – no university-wide writing program • Time to put effort into the design!

  5. Project background continued… A comment from the “supervising professor” • Student initiative • Serendipitous convergence of department developments (ESL program integration, MA projects) What do we have & what should future students gather?  Sarah’s project

  6. Documentation and further development Goals for my work on the project: • Documentation • better understand what was already in the corpus • read for paper topics and assignment types • Evaluate the organization of the corpus • By native-speaker/non-native speaker, student level, or department? • How is the corpus going to be used? → Goal is to learn about student writing in general → Organized primarily according to department • Guidelines for data collection

  7. Design principles • Quality of Writing • Assignments received a grade of ‘B’ or better • Diversity • Authors – selected up to 3 papers per student for a given department • Balanced Representation • Targeted collection = one or two departments for data collection and build relationships with students & professors

  8. Current Corpus Profile

  9. Corpus Profile Continued…

  10. Assignment Types Art & Literary Analysis ALAN Empirical Research EMPA Library Research LIBR Narrative (creative) NARR Reading Reaction READ Report REPT Personal Opinion POPN Proposal PROP Reflection REFL Self-Reflection SREF Theoretical Application THEA These abbreviations are included in the file names, along with department & author’s number/level

  11. Distinctions between assignment types: some examples

  12. Current state of the corpus: strengths and weaknesses Strengths • Good start for Humanities & Social Science • Descriptive file names & a framework for documentation • Useful for pedagogical purposes: answering ESL teachers’ questions & materials development Opportunities for improvement • Balance: 5 departments consist of 67% of the corpus • Need for science writing • Other departments with 15 papers or less: Anthropology, International Studies, Public Administration, Social Work, & others • Overall, more information about assignment guidelines

  13. Value of the corpus for pedagogical purposes: 1. Setting Curriculum Priorities 2. Professional development

  14. Setting Curriculum Priorities Example questions: 1. How much time should be spent on studying reduced relative clauses (RRCs)? Ex: …a four year plan comprised of streamlining processes. • Do proficient student writers used RRCs, and if so how? → quite frequent in professional academic prose → corpus gives us info about student writing 2. How does a successful writer of a library research paper utilize transitional phrases? • By Level 5 (out of 7), IELP students are practicing library research papers

  15. Importance of the corpus for in-service teachers Combining Skills/Contextualizing Grammar • Utilizing materials from this corpus in grammar classes will: • Develop grammar competence AND • Prime IELP/ESL students for writing at the next level Relevance • Tailoring activities according to student interests • Teachers can find samples from the disciplines she knows her students are planning to choose as majors

  16. Value for pre-service teacher training Culminating experience or practicum option: • Pursue corpus-based materials development project • Supplementary materials for an IELP class • “Symbiotic” mentorship with experienced instructor • Instructor (-time, -corpus training) • MA: TESOL student (+time, +corpus training, +eager to apply knowledge in practice) Results • Strengthens IELP instruction • Engages pre-service teachers in IELP curriculum • Readiness and confidence to teach academic English

  17. Challenges & Current Work • IELP teacher time & training • Collaborative projects for materials development & research MA student + IELP teacher + AL program faculty (H. Hahn-Streichen, D. Smith, S. Conrad, ORTESOL support) • Data overload / false generalizations • Research into corpus design: sample lengths (L. Spitzer) • Access and Plagiarism • Website including interface for corpus searches (T. Vaslev) • Motivating studentsto submit papers • Developing relationshipswith faculty in other depts

  18. Future Plans • Funding from PSU for an expanded corpus & research • Language characteristics of high and low papers • Demographic characteristics and writing characteristics (e.g. Does Gen 1.5 writing exist?) • Characteristics of University Studies writing (vs within depts) • Comparison of IELP papers & regular class papers • Principled corpus for research into... • Variation in “similar” assignments across disciplines • Text types of PSU writing (comparison with other universities, with BAWE, etc.) • Incorporation of corpus analysis with studies of classrooms & students

  19. Portland StateCorpus of Student Academic Writing User Agreement Form / Web Access conrads@pdx.edu salbers@pdx.edu Thank you

More Related