Exploiting corpora to provide guidance for academic writing: the BAWE Quicklinks project

This chapter reports on the BAWE Quicklinks project, an initiative offering teachers of English for Academic Purposes a way to help students engage with corpus data relevant to their particular writing needs. The project’s aim is to create a database of hyperlinks to corpus outputs from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (project website: http://bawequicklinks.coventry.domains/). The hyperlinks can be added to student work to help students overcome problems affecting intelligibility and/or communicative force.
The chapter explains the fundamentals of the approach and considerations we have had to take into account in creating the database. The focus at first will be on the identification of writing issues in terms of the types of phenomenon that are amenable to this treatment, with reference to phraseological linguistic models that guide the approach. There will also be a discussion of the querying and filtering methods that are used to find relevant examples from the corpus using the Sketch Engine interface. After that the focus will switch to a discussion of the types of output that can usefully be exploited by this hyperlink method (e.g. concordances, node form summaries, collocation lists) and what sort of phraseological issue they are most suited to addressing.