Task

Description

This corpus of written first-, second-, and third-term assigments of students of English at Uppsala University, Sweden, was collected by Ylva Berglund and Margareta Westergren Axelsson 1999-2001. It is (also) available from Oxford Text Archive, http://www.ota.ahds.ac.uk/. The corpus was described with the IMDI metadata set for the ECHO project.

The first letter in the corpus name denotes which term the paper was written ('a', 'b', 'c' for first, second, third term); the following number indicates the chronology of the assigment in that term. The assigments are briefly as follows:

a1. "English, my English." Students describe their experience of the English language, evaluating their reading, writing, speaking, and listening proficiency. Personal, involved style. Written late January or early September.
a2. Argumentation. Students argue for or against a statement concerning a topical issue. Formal style. Written in mid-February or early October.
a3. Reflections. Students reflect on the medium of television and its impact on people, or on related issues of their choice. Personal/formal style. Written in March or October.
a4. Literature course assignment. Students choose between a discussion of theme/character/narrator and a close-reading based analysis of a set passage. Formal style. Written in early April or November.
a5. Culture course assignment. Students study topics in set secondary sources and compose an essay using this material, often quoting and listing these sources. Topics include issues such as 19th-century education of women, the industrial revolution, slavery, and utopias. Written in late April or November.
b1. Causal analysis. Students discuss causes of some recent trend of their choice. Formal style. Suitable in content and style for comparison or combination with essay a3.
b2. Argumentation. Students present counter-arguments to views expressed in articles or letters to the editor. Similar in approach and tone to essay a1.
b3. Short papers in English linguistics, on various topics, e.g. loan words in English, English spelling, British and American English, the semantic properties of synonymous pairs. Academic style. Lengthy tables, lists of words, and appendices, irrelevant to the study of learner English, were removed (the place was marked in the document). Essays may still contain words in other languages than English, or from earlier periods of English, items quoted directly from dictionaries, and lists of references.
b4. English literature. A discussion of character, theme etc., produced in a survey course, dealing with Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar or contemporary novels. Essays may contain quotations, sometimes also references to secondary sources. Academic style.
b5. American literature. Similar to b4. Essays formed part of a course on American contemporary novels and may contain quotations and references to secondary sources. Academic style.
b6. Taboo, not taboo. (12 essays)
b7. Politics and education. (15 essays)
b8. School visit reports. (3 essays)
c1. Collected only in the spring term, 2000. Seven longer essays, all literature course assignments.