BAWE: an introduction to a new resource

Abstract

The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus was developed with ESRC funding as part of the project entitled ‘An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British Higher Education ’ (2004-2007). The project aimed to identify the characteristics of proficient student writing, and to compare these across disciplines and levels of study. The corpus consists of just under 3000 student assignments of a good standard (6,506,995 words), at all levels from first year undergraduate to taught masters degree, and in many disciplines. Information about discipline and level is provided in the header for each assignment file, alongside other types of contextual information which did not influence collection policy such as gender, year of birth, native speaker status, and years of UK secondary education. We believe that BAWE is currently the only complete corpus of its kind in the public domain. It offers opportunities to investigate student writing which has been judged to conform to departmental requirements, but which differs markedly from expert and near-expert academic writing in terms of its communicative intent.

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