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

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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

Representativeness (2): the BAWE corpus A trade-off: stratified sampling AH SSLS PS EnglishHistoryLinguisticsClassicsArchaeologyHistory of ArtPhysicsChemistryMeteorologyMathematics Computer Science Engineering SociologyLawBusiness PoliticsAnthropologyPublishingMedicine Biological Sciences BiochemistryAgricultureFood Sciences Health & Social Care Frame 1: the university: corpus Σ=3,072 ass. Frame 2: 4 disciplinary groups à 768 ass. Frame 3: 4x6 disciplines à 128 ass. Frame 4: 4 levels per discipline à 32 ass.

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

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

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

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

Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing and their implications for sampling and annotation Alois Heuboeck University of Reading, UK The British Academic Written English corpus