View Public Project: Corpus of Advanced Academic Writing in L2 in Austria [PR105501] = CAARLLA

Beginnjahr 2011 Abschlussjahr 2014

Institutionen

durchführende Institutionen

Personen

ProjektleiterInnen+Ansprechpersonen MitarbeiterInnen
Ländercode Österreich Sprachcode Deutsch, Englisch
Schlagwörter Deutschfachprüfung
Schlagwörter Englischapplied linguistics, corpus linguistics, L2 writing
Abstrakt

The aim of CAARLA is to validate selected aspects of the assessment procedures used in the Department of English and American Studies, building on existing work on standardization and contributing to our ongoing endeavours to ensure fairness and objectivity when grading students' assignments, and to statistically establish agreement on what constitutes an appropriate standard of English for the Department's graduates. As a basis for validation, a corpus of students' work of between 0.5 and 3 million words will be assembled comprising three main types of text:

a)   the written component of the high-stakes "Fachprüfung", the final language examination taken in both the BA and teaching programmes, which is graded by a commission of three people;

b)   written components of language classes (homework, portfolios and examinations) which are graded by the lecturer; and

c)   assignments such as portfolios, proseminar and seminar papers, which are submitted by students in linguistics, literature and culture courses and graded by the lecturer.

This corpus will be analysed quantitatively in relation to chosen grammatical and vocabulary features, such as use of complex structures (i.e. focusing devices, marked word order, expressions of modality) and breadth and depth of vocabulary, while error tagging in a subsequent development phase will enable us to confirm (or reject) our hypothesis on the intuitive awareness we teachers have of our students' general strengths and weaknesses, ultimately leading, it is hoped, to an increase in learner proficiency, and contributing to work on validating the scale in use for assessing writing at university level.

Hauptkategorie(n)Bildungsinhalt (Themenfeld)
Lehren und Lernen (Prozesse und Methoden)
Information, Kommunikation, Statistik
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