A New Corpus of Student Academic Writing

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