A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing

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A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing

• Susan Conrad
• Sarah Albers
• Department of Applied Linguistics
• Portland State University

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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

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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

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Project background continued

• Realizations
• More general use for PSUs 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!

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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?
? Sarahs project
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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

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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

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Current Corpus Profile
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Corpus Profile Continued
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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 authors
number/level
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Distinctions between assignment types some
examples
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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

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Value of the corpus for pedagogical purposes

• 1. Setting Curriculum Priorities
• 2. Professional development

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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

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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

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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

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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 students to submit papers
• Developing relationships with faculty in other
  depts

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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

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Portland StateCorpus of Student Academic Writing

• User Agreement Form / Web Access
• conrads_at_pdx.edu
• salbers_at_pdx.edu
• Thank you