MICUSP Research Goals

Research Goals

Writing Development

With data ranging from 4th year undergraduates to third year graduate students, we will be able to analyze graduate student writing development, asking questions like: What changes, for example in lexical-grammar and discourse patterns, do we find in texts as students become more advanced?

Genre Variation

Our database will provide a snapshot of assessed genres used at a major US research university, allowing us to explore questions like: What are the characteristics of the various genres that have developed? How similar is graduate student writing to published scholarly writing?

Spoken vs Written Language

As a complement to the MICASE corpus, MICUSP will make it possible to analyze the similarities and differences between student speech and student writing. We can investigate questions like: What linguistic effects do the different conditions of speech and writing give rise to?

Disciplinary Writing

With data from a range of departments at the U of M, we will be able to map disciplinary variation in academic writing across the university, asking questions like: How do writing styles, conventions and technique vary across departments and disciplines?

NNS Writing Patterns

With samples of writing by both native and non-native speaker students, we will have an opportunity to ask questions like: What are the differences between native-speaker versus non-native-speaker writing patterns, for example in the use of metadiscourse?

Cross-Linguistic Variation

With comparable databases of proficient student writing in other languages or language varieties, we will be able to make cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal comparisons. As an example, a similar corpus of British English student writing, the BAWE corpus, has been compiled in the UK.