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Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing

This project explores the pedagogic uses of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of student writing, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. It discusses accessing corpus information, building corpora, and using corpora in language pedagogy. The corpus size, representativeness, and annotation features are also considered.

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Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing

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  1. Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing and their implications for sampling and annotation Alois Heuboeck University of Reading, UK

  2. The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of student writing Project in progress at the universities of Reading, Warwick and Oxford Brookes Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (project nr. RES-000-23-0800)

  3. Outline • Corpora in LT: uses and purposes • Accessing corpus information: interfaces • Building corpora: requirements and decisions - the BAWE corpus

  4. Using corpora in language pedagogy classroom pedagogic uses materials description “motivational” purposes “linguistic”

  5. Interfaces (1): the concordance typical query options • word form • lemma • wildcards (e.g. “investigat*”) • grammatical (e.g. POS) • patterns

  6. Information & interfaces (2) • Frequencies, ratios statistics • e.g. word list, key words • ad hoc statistics • macrostructural properties and choices corpus items • generic types, e.g. CARS model (Swales 1990)

  7. Requirements: a “good corpus” for language pedagogy • Representative: target variety • Relevant: information, annotation • Usable: e.g. interface, size

  8. Representativeness The corpus as a representative sample should reflect: Conflicting principles • distribution and quantitative relations quantitative representativeness • range of features qualitative representativeness

  9. Representativeness (2):the BAWE corpus A trade-off: stratified sampling AH PS Frame 2: 4 disciplinary groups à 768 ass. Computer Science English History Linguistics Classics Archaeology History of Art Physics Chemistry Meteorology Mathematics Engineering Frame 1: the university: corpus Σ=3,072 ass. Frame 4: 4 levels per discipline à 32 ass. Frame 3: 4x6 disciplines à 128 ass. SS LS Biological Sciences Health & Social Care Sociology Law Business Politics Anthropology Publishing Medicine Biochemistry Agriculture Food Sciences

  10. Relevance Relevant information in corpus Significant query Corpus annotation Features: lexicogrammatical, structural etc.

  11. Relevance (2): features annotated in the BAWE corpus • “grammatical” • textual: structure of “running text” • typographical (lay-out) • metatextual: numbering • other “interesting” features

  12. Corpus size “For the pedagogical analysis of many common grammatical phenomena a full-size research corpus is much too large.” (Osborne 2000) Modularity: subcorpora Specialised corpora

  13. Conclusion: 3 views • Qualitative vs. quantitative representation corpus as representation of a (set of) target variety/varieties • Corpus annotation and interfaces: query instances of lexicogrammatical (etc.) features and phenomena • Corpus size: modularity balanced samples of target variety/varieties

  14. Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing and their implications for sampling and annotation Alois Heuboeck University of Reading, UK a.heuboeck@reading.ac.uk The British Academic Written English corpus http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/BAWE/overview

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