The BAWE Quicklinks project is based at Coventry University (see our Corpus Linguistics at Coventry site here); the team members are Hilary Nesi, Benet Vincent and Daniel Quinn. This site, a major part of the project, is designed as an aid for teachers who’d like to introduce students to concordances (see example below) that can help raise their awareness of how English works.
All of the concordances are ones which we have retrieved from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus based on what we might call ‘infelicitous’ uses of English found in student assignments – i.e. those that don’t seem quite right in the context. In each case we have tried to retrieve concordance lines that might help lead students to a more ‘felicitous’ means of expression. Once the lines are retrieved from the corpus, it is possible to make links (‘quicklinks’) to the lines which can then be added to student work when providing feedback.
An example of the sort of issue that we are trying to address is the student who writes…
Shulman (1989) quoted that…
… when trying to cite a source, without realising that the verb quote doesn’t really have that-clause complementation. We looked in the BAWE corpus and found some more appropriate instances, which are shown in this link – you can click to view in new tab, but it looks a bit like this:
The point here is to try to focus on issues that commonly come up – by sharing these links we want others to be able to benefit from this work too. It may not be often that a student writes X quoted that, but it seems fair to say that quite a lot of students writing papers in English make mistakes when trying to cite from the literature, and hopefully this link could be useful to point out to them more appropriate usage.
As part of the project, we are trying to make the database of quicklinks we hope will be of use – these links are accessible through the Quicklink directory – Encyclopedia Index Page. Since with time there could be a lot of these, we want to try to make them easy to find. Please browse through, feel free to use these and let us know via the comments options if you have any suggestions. You might first want to watch the screencast on our Directory page.
More updates will follow – including posts on how to embed the links, how to retrieve concordances (using Corpus Query Language) and more.
Disclaimer
The information, views, and opinions, topics, discussion contained on this website are those of the authors and do not reflect the views and opinions of Coventry University.