Introducing BAWE: A New Lexicographical Resource

By November 17, 2016,
Page 737-740
Author Hilary Nesi
Title Introducing BAWE: A New Lexicographical Resource
Abstract This paper reports on the compilation of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, a collection of almost 3,000 proficient student assignments produced at three representative universities in the UK. BAWE was designed to fill a gap in current corpus resources by complementing other writing collections which represent expertly written academic text-such as the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus, or non-expert and non-discipline specific student writing-such as the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays, and the Cambridge Syndicate Examination corpus. Prior to the development of BAWE the few small corpora of writing produced by university students within their disciplines had either been compiled for individual scholarly purposes, or were in the form of inadequately documented and unannotated .essay banks. for student use. The BAWE corpus, in contrast, is a large, formally compiled collection of assignments at four levels of study, from first year undergraduate to masters level, accompanied by detailed contextual information. Thirteen broad macrogenres have been identified in the corpus, including the essay, of course, and writing generically similar to the published research article, but also including other types of writing, neglected in the literature, which reflect the purpose of university level study. The full corpus will be freely available to researchers from January 2008, and it is foreseen that it will provide a-currently unique-resource for designers of dictionaries for advanced learners, particularly those learners studying at university level in the medium of English.
Session 3. Reports on Lexicographical and Lexicological Projects
Keywords
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX08-063,
author = {Hilary Nesi},
title = {Introducing BAWE: A New Lexicographical Resource},
pages = {737-740},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2008},
month = {jul},
date = {15-19},
address = {Barcelona, Spain},
editor = {Elisenda Bernal, Janet DeCesaris},
publisher = {Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra},
isbn = {978-84-96742-67-3},
}
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