Writing for a purpose: materials to improve the quality of discipline-specific student work

This project follows on from 'An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing in British Higher Education', a three-year study which identified and described the linguistic and organizational features of successful student assignments. The investigation entailed the collection, annotation and analysis of almost 3000 good-quality student texts, fairly evenly distributed across four levels of university study and more than 30 disciplines. These texts form the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, a unique resource which is freely available to researchers via the Oxford Text Archive. The texts in the corpus are categorized not only according to their discipline and level, but also according to thirteen broad 'genre families', ranging from Case Studies and Essays to Proposals and Methodology Recounts. This categorization is new, and draws attention to the existence of many types of student writing that have previously been neglected in textbooks and course materials concerned with the development of academic writing skills. The practical implications of our findings have now been discussed in several doctoral theses and many research publications, including our forthcoming book which describes in detail the characteristics of texts belonging to each of the genre families.
One of the main aims of our original study was to inform the development of teaching and learning resources for novice academic writers. We were especially interested in supporting students who had not had sufficient prior opportunity to acquire appropriate writing skills, for example because their earlier education had taken place outside the UK, because their first language was not English, and/or because they were embarking on a completely new field of study. We now propose to draw on the knowledge we have gained from our original study to build a substantial bank of online materials, designed with the discipline-specific learning needs of novice academic writers in mind.
In creating these materials we will work closely with experts from the British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP), and with the Global English team at the British Council. The project will allow for extensive consultation and piloting with writing tutors and with learner writers, accessed via BALEAP and British Council networks. Meetings with representatives of these stakeholder groups are built into the project design, and during the development phase we have also planned for iterative usability testing with these groups, both face-to-face and remotely. The British Council will supply us with a customizable and authorable exercise tool and editorial guidance to achieve a consistent house style for the materials, which will be hosted and maintained on the popular British Council 'Learn English' website. We will also draw on the facilities and technical expertise of Coventry University's Serious Games Institute, which is a centre of excellence for games-based learning and can help us to incorporate exciting new modes of human-computer interaction into our materials.
We have recently received a small grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to develop a more user-friendly and accessible interface for the BAWE corpus. We hope that this will encourage learner writers to explore the corpus resources, either by themselves or in the writing class. Our materials will contain learning tasks to complement and enrich such explorations, thus establishing connections between research and practice.

Our materials will set a new standard for writing tuition, and will have the potential to change the way the teaching of academic writing is conceived internationally.
The project is unique because it will be informed by a large corpus of authentic proficient student writing across disciplines (the BAWE corpus). The BAWE corpus is the first of its kind, and our materials will be the first to present the major categories of writing identified in this corpus, each of which is associated with several genres. A recent review of twenty popular academic writing textbooks (1) notes the serious lack of materials for teaching many of the genres we have identified; most academic writing textbooks focus on 'essays' and 'reports' to the exclusion of other types of student writing in widespread use in modern English-medium universities.
The corpus analysis and genre classification that has been undertaken for our research project has provided us with an in-depth understanding of the form, purpose and linguistic features of university assignment genres. We will convey this knowledge within the materials we develop, and we expect this knowledge transfer to have a direct impact on universities, by improving the quality of the student experience and rates of retention, raising writing standards, and helping to relieve the pressure on subject tutors who must mark and provide feedback on assignments written by novice student writers. The materials will be made available on the British Council's Learn English website, freely accessible in most countries around the world. We will also make use of the British Council's vast educational networks and facilities to promote take-up of the materials.

(1) Tribble, C. 2009. 'Writing academic English; a survey review of current published resources'. ELT Journal 63/4:400-417.