Nesi, Hilary
(2018).
An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British higher education.
[Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex:
Economic and Social Research Council.
10.5255/UKDA-SN-850012
Data description (abstract)
This project aims to identify genres of assessed writing at university level, and to investigate textual variation across disciplines and years of study in the context of academic conventions and tutor expectations of student writing.
Academic tutors in a wide range of disciplines will be consulted, and about 3,000 samples of proficient student writing will be collected at the participating universities. These will be categorised into broad genres, following tutors' advice together with evidence provided by assignment titles, course documentation and departmental naming practices. The assignments in these broad genres will be entered into a database and will undergo multidimensional analysis to identify the key linguistic features of each genre. In the final year of the project, typical samples will be subjected to closer textual analysis, and the database will be prepared for archive deposit as the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.
The outcome of the project will be a detailed description of the major genres of assessed student writing, identifying their social purpose, typical organisational patterns and key linguistic features. The findings will inform the teaching and assessment of academic writing in higher education.
| Data creators: |
| Creator Name |
Affiliation |
ORCID (as URL) |
| Nesi Hilary |
Coventry University |
|
|
| Contributors: |
| Name |
Affiliation |
ORCID (as URL) |
| Thompson PA |
University of Birmingham |
|
| Wickens Paul |
Oxford Brookes University |
|
| Gardner Sheena |
Coventry University |
|
|
| Sponsors: |
Economic and Social Research Council
|
| Grant reference: |
RES-000-23-0800
|
| Topic classification: |
Media, communication and language
Education
|
| Date published: |
03 Oct 2008 09:36
|
| Last modified: |
16 Aug 2018 09:30
|
| Collection period: |
| Date from: | Date to: |
|---|
| 1 November 2004 | 31 December 2007 |
|
| Country: |
United Kingdom |
| Data collection method: |
The BAWE corpus contains 2761 pieces of proficient assessed student writing, ranging in length from about 500 words to about 5000 words. Holdings are fairly evenly distributed across four broad disciplinary areas (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences) and across four levels of study (undergraduate and taught masters level). Thirty-five disciplines are represented. The assignments have been annotated using a system devised in accordance with the TEI guidelines. There is a dtd file which must be kept in the same folder as the corpus files, named tei_bawe.dtd and the holdings are described in an Excel spreadsheet 'BAWE.xls'. The transcription and mark-up conventions are described in the BAWE manual document, which is in PDF format. |
| Observation unit: |
Text unit |
| Kind of data: |
Text |
| Type of data: |
Qualitative and mixed methods data |
| Resource language: |
English |
|
| Data sourcing, processing and preparation: |
Students volunteered to contribute, and confirmed their consent via an online acceptance form. Personal data has been removed from the corpus and the accompanying Excel spreadsheet.
|
| Rights owners: |
| Name |
Affiliation |
ORCID (as URL) |
| Nesi Hilary |
Coventry University |
|
|
| Contact: |
| Name | Email | Affiliation | ORCID (as URL) |
|---|
| Nesi, Hilary | h.nesi@coventry.ac.uk | Coventry University | Unspecified |
|
| Notes on access: |
The Data Collection is available from an external repository. Access is available via Related Resources.
|
| Publisher: |
Economic and Social Research Council
|
| Last modified: |
16 Aug 2018 09:30
|
|
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