MICUSP
  
Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers
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Research

Since the corpus is not yet complete, only a few pilot studies have been carried out on the basis of MICUSP data to date. Two of those have been presented at conferences: one on citation practices (or "attribution") across disciplines, and the other on the use of metadiscourse (or "text about text"). A third study, which has only been presented in the ELI, looked at the so-called "anticipatory it" (as in "It is important to note that...") in a subset of 500,000 words. The references to the conference presentations are as follows:

  • Adel, Annelie. 2006. "Citation practices across the disciplines: The case of proficient student writing". Paper presented at AELFE 5. Zaragoza, Spain.
  • Adel, Annelie. 2006. "Metadiscourse in MICUSP: Reflexive Phraseology in a New Corpus of Student Writing". Paper presented at ICAME 27. Helsinki, Finland.

In the future, the MICUSP corpus will make possible several different lines of empirical research, exploring topics such as:

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 grammar, lexis, 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 a balanced sample 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 a matching database 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 is being compiled in the UK.