1. Gill Kendon International Study and Language Institute
Building a corpus of pre-sessional student essays: practicalities and benefits
Gill Kendon
International Study and Language Institute

2. Setting it up - Challenges
Time
Selecting corpus tool
Selecting essays
permissions
preparing
Shell script
student data

3. Categorisation Attribute Values Task Language1 Study level Attainment
E1 Alternative sources of Energy
E2 Commercial influences on Science
E3 Global food supplies
P1 Sustainable development
Project2
E4 Aging population
Language1
Thai
Chinese
Arabic
Kazahk
OtherSlavic
Romance (Incl Spanish, Italian, etc)
Germanic (Incl German, Scadanavian languages)
OtherAsian
Other
Study level PG UG
Attainment
High (final grade of 6.5 +)
Medium
Low (final grade 5 or below)
Course
Summer pre-sessional 2013
Student code

4. Selecting subsections

5. Using the corpus Supplementary worksheets
Checking on guided self-study
Errors from a particular group
e.g. Using personal style
In my opinion there are some ways to improve the situation
The third method I can think up is recycling waste
Simple search for ‘I’ , ‘my’ etc
Sentence view vs KWIC view
Error correction task

8. Use: Online learning Online learning objects Xerte Toolkit
Examples of errors
Use corpus to identify types of error
e.g. such as
clause in the wrong place
complete list
too many examples
including a second ‘example marker’ (etc., and so on,…)

12. Use: positive examples
Critique real life examples
Realistic models
Finding good examples
Essay on threats to global food supplies.
select higher scoring students and later essay
added <p> tag at preparation stage to identify paragraph boundaries
<p><s/>

13. Paragraph leaders Doc#205
<p> Topic: There are many threats to global food supplies.
<p> One of the important factors for driving the world is food.
<p> As a result of a population explosion and climate change, there are two main problems with global food supplies.
<p> There are two main solutions to limit the threats to global food supplies.
<p> Although the solutions can increase the food production and deal with climate change issues, there are some conditions to these solutions.
<p> In conclusion, the population explosion and climate change are the cause of shortage food and ecosystem issues.

15. Use: vocabulary
Compare use of effect in pre-sessional corpus with that in BAWE

16. Reflections Was it worthwhile? YES Collecting the essays Turnitin
earlier draft – richer source of errors
later drafts for good examples
Categorisation?
time consuming
attractive idea, but…
Smaller collections
single group – own errors