MICUSP Paper Classification

The goal of the MICUSP paper classification was to enable corpus users to browse for and search in papers of a particular type, e.g. research papers or reports.

The paper classification system was developed through a series of interlocking steps by a group of scholars and graduate students in the fields of corpus linguistics, genre analysis, EAP pedagogy, and language testing. The development of a classification system was essentially data-driven:

• random sets of papers pulled from MICUSP were classified independently by a group of linguists, EAP teachers & graduate students in English and Education;
• an initial set of categories and definitions was redefined several times based on further MICUSP evidence.

The result of this procedure was a list of seven paper categories (in alphabetical order):

• argumentative essay
• creative writing
• critique/evaluation
• proposal
• report
• research paper
• response paper.

To see our definitions and text type examples for each of these categories, please follow the link below.

• Definitions for MICUSP paper classification

  Definitions and text type examples for each of the MICUSP paper categories