Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing

1
Pedagogic uses of a corpus of student writing

• and their implications for sampling and
  annotation
• Alois Heuboeck
• University of Reading, UK

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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)

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Outline

• Corpora in LT uses and purposes

• Accessing corpus information interfaces

• Building corpora requirements and decisions -
  the BAWE corpus

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Using corpora in language pedagogy
classroom
pedagogic uses
materials
description
motivational
purposes
linguistic
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Interfaces (1) the concordance
typical query options

• word form

• lemma

• wildcards (e.g. investigat)

• grammatical (e.g. POS)

• patterns

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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)

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Requirements a good corpus for language
pedagogy

• Representative target variety

• Relevant information, annotation

• Usable e.g. interface, size

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Representativeness
The corpus as a representative sample should
reflect
Conflicting principles

• distribution and quantitative relations

quantitative representativeness

• range of features

qualitative representativeness
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Representativeness (2)the BAWE corpus
A trade-off stratified sampling
AH
PS
Frame 2 4 disciplinary groups à 768 ass.
English
History
Linguistics
Classics
Archaeology
History of Art
Physics
Chemistry
Meteorology
Mathematics
Computer Science
Engineering
Frame 1 the university corpus S3,072 ass.
Frame 3 4x6 disciplines à 128 ass.
Frame 4 4 levels per discipline à 32 ass.
SS
LS
Biological Sciences
Health Social Care
Sociology
Law
Business
Politics
Anthropology
Publishing
Medicine
Biochemistry
Agriculture
Food Sciences
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Relevance
Relevant information in corpus
Significant query
Corpus annotation
Features lexicogrammatical, structural etc.
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Relevance (2) features annotated in the BAWE
corpus

• grammatical

• textual structure of running text

• typographical (lay-out)

• metatextual numbering

• other interesting features

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