The Uppsala Student English Project is a project initiated at the Department of English, Uppsala University. The project aims at creating a corpus (computer-readable collection of text) of material submitted by students. The corpus is used for language research of various kind, teaching, and production of teaching material.
The project started with a pilot study during the autumn term 1998. As the pilot study turned out to be successful, the project has been enlarged to encompass all A-course (first term) students at the department from the spring term 1999 on, and also students on the B-course from the autumn term 1999.
Participation in the project is voluntary. The students are given a presentation about the project, with a short introduction to corpus linguistics. Those who choose to participate fill out a simple questionnaire with background information (sex, age, first language, years abroad, etc.) and a consent form, where they agree to make their material available for research and consent to the possible publication of it in various forms.
The material for the corpus consists of the essays from the writing course that the students take as a compulsory unit during their first term at the department, and essays written as part of the Literature and Culture courses. Each student, thus, writes up to five essays, about 700-1,000 words long, on five different topics. In addition to this, the students are encouraged to submit also revised versions of their essays when such exist (i.e. if they are asked by their tutors to re-write an essay in part or whole). All essays are anonymised (the author's name is removed) and converted to a uniform format. The background information is coded and included in a database.
The primary goal of creating a corpus of approximately 500,000 words was reached already in 1999. The collection now continues, and since 2001 the focus is on adding to the collection of essays from the B-course. The present size of the corpus is around one million words. The corpus is not created for one particular project, but will be available for research, teaching, and production of teaching material of various kinds.
For further information about the project or the corpus, please contact the project coordinators, Ylva Berglund and Margareta Westergren Axelsson at the Department of English, Uppsala University.
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