History

A pilot for the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus was run in 2001, with support from the University of Warwick Teaching Development Fund. The pilot corpus contains about one million words of text, in the form of 500 student assignments ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 words, representing twenty departments at Warwick University. Details are reported in:

Nesi, H., Sharpling, G. & Ganobcsik-Williams, L. (2004) "Student papers across the curriculum: Designing and developing a corpus of British student writing". Computers and Composition Volume 21, Issue 4, pp 401-503

ESRC funding to expand and analyse the BAWE corpus was granted for the period December 2004 – December 2007, as part of the project ‘An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British Higher Education’. Texts for the corpus were gathered at the Universities of Warwick, Reading, Oxford Brookes and Coventry.

Project Team for Corpus Development (in alphabetical order)

Siân Alsop (2005 - 2007)

Siân assisted in recording interviews, in the collection of assignments (making contact with students, supervising submissions, and paying contributors), and in corpus preparation (recording submission details and storing assignments).

Douglas Biber (2004 - 2007)

Douglas Biber is a Regents' Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. He acted as consultant to the project and conducted the multidimensional analysis.

Mary Deane (2006 - 2007)

Mary Deane is a lecturer at the Centre for Academic Writing and has helped disseminate information about the project and corpus collection practices.

Dr Signe Ebeling (2004 - 2006)

Signe assisted in recording interviews and collecting of assignments at Oxford Brookes. She also assisted Paul Wickens in corpus preparation (recording submission details and storing assignments). Signe is now teaching at the Norwegian Military Academy.

Dr Richard Forsyth (2004 - 2005)

Richard assisted in the co-ordination of interviews and assignment collection, and the recording and management of interview and assignment data. He also took day-to-day responsibility for the corpus.

Dr Lisa Ganobcsik Williams (2006 - 2007)

Lisa is co-ordinator of the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University, and has helped disseminate information about the project and corpus collection practices.

Dr Sheena Gardner (2004 - 2007)

Sheena conducted detailed analysis of macrogenres in the corpus and is carrying out ongoing research in this area. She also supervised Laura Powell, recipient of a Warwick University Undergraduate Research Scholarship in 2006, who interviewed undergraduate students in connection with the project. Sheena was a senior lecturer in the Centre for English Language Teacher Education (now Centre for Applied Linguistics), University of Warwick, and joined the University of Birmingham as a reader in the School of Education in August 2007.

Penny Gilchrist (2006 - 2007)

Penny Gilchrist is the administrator for the Centre for Academic Writing. She co-ordinated the collection of assignments at Coventry.

Alois Heuboeck (2004 - 2007)

Alois assisted Paul Thompson in the collection of assignments and corpus preparation. He also interviewed academic staff at Reading University, and was particularly involved in the encoding of the corpus.

Dawn Hindle (2004 - 2005)

Dawn assisted in recording interviews, in the collection of assignments (making contact with students, supervising submissions, and paying contributors), and in corpus preparation (recording submission details and storing assignments).

Dr Jasper Holmes (2005 - 2007)

Jasper was responsible for documentation, tagging and wider theoretical issues, and participated in the analysis of the corpus. He also took day-to-day responsibility for the corpus and for managing collection, tagging and research.

Maria Leedham (2004 - 2006)

Maria assisted in recording interviews and collecting assignments at Oxford Brookes University. She also assisted Paul Wickens in corpus preparation (recording submission details and storing assignments). Maria is now a researcher at the Open University, and is using BAWE data to investigate the writing of L1 Mandarin and L1 English students (supervised by Ann Hewings, Barbara Mayor and Sarah North).

Dr Hilary Nesi (2004 - 2007)

Hilary managed the project, and co-ordinated assignment collection, academic staff interviews and text analysis. She was a reader in the Centre for English Language Teacher Education (now Centre for Applied Linguistics), University of Warwick, and joined Coventry University as a Professor in English Language in October 2007.

Dr Paul Thompson (2004 - 2007)

Paul managed the project at Reading University. He organised academic interviews at Reading; co-ordinated the development of the mark up scheme and supervised the presentation of the corpus.

Dr Paul Wickens (2004 - 2007)

Paul managed the project at Oxford Brookes University. He conducted detailed analysis of macrogenres in the corpus and is carrying out ongoing research in this area.