Development of a multi-level, multi-genre learner corpus academic writing

Project Type: Node
Project Start Date: 1 March 2017
Project Status: Completed

Project Aims:

Development of a multi-genre, multi-level learner corpus of academic writing in order to develop, refine and implement an online academic writing tool

Collect additional data from various universities in South Africa to grow the multi-level, multi-genre learner corpus of academic writing

Redevelopment of the Write‐it Course in SADiLaR’s Moodle environment

Project Deliverables:

• Corpus Data Collection Texts
• Surface annotation (POS tagging, lemmatising and chunking) of 50 000 words running text in Afrikaans and English
• Deep annotation (error tagging according to the tag set developed for the first phase) of 50 000 words running text in Afrikaans and English
• Pedagogical Resources, including:
• Academic Writing videos 10X
• Academic writing tips and techniques 10X
• Academic writing exercises 40X (4x for each of the ten topics)
• Academic word list/dictionary
• At least 1000 entries with different parts of speech and contextualised examples
• Four languages: Setswana, IsiZulu, Afrikaans, English: Afrikaans and English as baseline; translation will follow for the African languages
• Layout and press ready material for release on SADiLaR repository  
• Moodle Course, covering the following topics:
  1. Task Analysis
  2. Planning your writing
  3. Searching for information
  4. Academic writing
  5. Structure of a paragraph
  6. Introduction and conclusion
  7. Introduction to argument structure
  8. Discourse markers
  9. Introduction to referencing
  10. Source introduction
  11. Paraphrasing
  12. Develop a convincing voice
  13. Clarity and accuracy
  14. Referencing
  15. Academic integrity for students