Wording/Course description

English for Research Writing is a short ‘workshop’ style course where novice academic writers can learn how to use corpus and concordancing tools in order to improve their writing for thesis or publication. The course covers the basics of corpus searching, as well as showing how to build a simple corpus and use it to learn about the use of English in any field of knowledge.

Course metrics

• Learning hours: about 20 hours
• Duration: 4 weeks, 5 hours per week
• Assessment: 2 assessed tasks, completed through course activities
• Formal credit option: Not at this stage
• Connection to other courses: this is a micro course comprising one of three modules in the UOW course “Fundamentals of HDR Writing”. It can be used by itself, in independent study, or as a module within various advanced level courses in academic writing.
• Credential: Certificate of participation (useful for portfolio demonstrating English language proficiency)  
• Level: advanced English language studies; postgraduate degrees; professional development

What’s the course about?

The course shows you how to use 'corpus tools' to improve your academic writing. While there is no quick and easy way to become proficient in English language academic writing (sorry, no software will do the hard work for you), this course will show you how to use software to see patterns in the language of your discipline that you probably overlook when just reading for information. It will develop your understanding of how English works much more quickly than if you just read without examining the language carefully. Seeing many examples of how a specific word, phrase or grammatical structure is used in large collections of academic texts helps you more quickly develop a sophisticated writing style, and confident ‘voice’ in your own academic writing. The course will help research writers in any discipline improve their academic writing and proficiency in English language, by closely examining the linguistic choices made by disciplinary experts.

What will I learn?

In this course you will learn how to:

• search large reference corpora, such as the BNC, for specific sentence-level features of English
• create your own, discipline-specific corpus
• use AntConc software to search your corpus for collocations, frequency patterns and grammatical structures in the English of your discipline
• use feedback and corpus searching to improve on your draft academic writing
• distinguish between legitimate corpus-based language learning and plagiarism
• participate in open peer review and collaborative corpus development activities
• critically reflect on the process of rewriting and the role of language in learning

How is learning ‘measured’?

To assess how you're mastering the use of corpus tools for language learning, three simple assignments are to be completed. Grades are not recorded, but you can evaluate your own (and peers') performance in the tasks according to the criteria shared via a rubric.

1. Creating and sharing a machine-readable collection of academic journal articles
2. Identifying and correcting linguistic problems in novice academic writing, with reference to specific corpora
3. Creating a portfolio of draft & edited academic writing, with critical reflection (in any media) on personal problems in using English and language learning achieved through using corpus & concordancing tools

What’s involved, exactly?

The course includes quizzes, activities, discussions and videos, featuring teachers and students of corpus-based language learning at the University of Wollongong. During the course, you'll hear different voices sharing their ideas and opinions – and we want to hear your voice too. What do you struggle with in using English for research? What is YOUR experience of language learning and academic literacy? We want you to join us, to discuss effective language learning and the use of corpus tools.

You will join a community of advanced language learners interested in using open corpus tools to develop proficiency in English and academic writing. This is a learning experience based on novice and professional writing in specific disciplines, where you will work on specific linguistic problems that hinder your own writing.

You’ll create your own machine-readable corpus from the published literature on a specific topic relevant to your own research, and use the free concordancing software recommended to identify key patterns in the language of your discipline.

You'll be encouraged to share your findings and help other participants in the course understand what can be done with these tools. You'll interact with one another online by sharing your developing bibliographies, annotations, and draft writing for academic purposes (PhD proposal, literature review or a paper for public presentation), and review one another’s use of corpus and concordancing techniques for language development.

You'll explore professional writing and typical learner errors; create a personal corpus (machine readable collection) of your current academic readings; and use software to search corpora and learn specific lexical and grammatical features characterising the English of your discipline. The ultimate aim and focus of the course is to investigate and improve your own academic writing – the thesis or research paper you are currently writing.

We've organised this short course into 4 stages, as it's designed to run over four weeks, during summer or Autumn sessions at UOW. If that schedule doesn't suit your timetable, you can still join in - the course materials remain open all year, so you can join at any time, and work at your own pace, with or without a regular instructor.

Each stage of the course is organised around some specific questions to get you going. The driving questions are designed to help you notice the different ‘levels’ on which language operates, and think about structures and patterns, rather than ‘rules’ of language. There are questions that stimulate you to think about what language is, and how to be understand ‘errors’ in a positive way. Some questions will be quite specific, and answers can be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, others are far more open, and prompt discussion and consideration of evidence, without necessarily leading to firm conclusions.

How does this course relate to other courses?

It's not expected that students coming into this course will have any previous knowledge of corpus and concordancing tools for language education, but it is assumed that participants will already know how to search academic databases, and can quickly find publications for a literature review. The course is aimed at graduate level research students (level 9 in the Australian system of higher education), and can be used as a module within a larger course in academic writing at postgraduate level.

Where's the course coming from?

The course has been developed at the University of Wollongong (in Australia) by EP, drawing on the classroom-based course RESH900: Fundamentals of HDR Writing. That course targets the needs of students who are using English as an additional language, and not feeling yet quite proficient in this medium when it comes to the specific and complex demands of thesis writing or writing for publication.

Philosophically, the course is coming from a strong belief in open, collaborative learning. While it introduces you to some of the latest ideas in research and practice in language education at advanced level, providing information and instruction, the course also relies heavily on what the students bring to the open learning environment here - the sentence-level ‘errors’ you share from your own current experience in doing academic writing,  and your own use of corpus tools to understand and overcome your errors in academic writing. Contribution to the collective pool of resources is expected and valued.