Belcher D.

Biber D.

Comrey A.L.

Gray B.E.

Halliday M.A.K.

Hinkel E.

Hyland K.

Hymes D.

Jack A. Hardy

Johns A.

Reppen R.

Römer U.

Swales J.M.

Ute Römer

 The purpose of this study was to uncover sets of co-occurring, lexico-grammatical features to help to characterise successful student writing. The writing was captured by the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP, 2009) and was taken from sixteen disciplines. MICUSP is a corpus of A-graded, upper-level student papers of different disciplines and paper types ( O'Donnell and Römer, 2012 ; and Römer and O'Donnell, 2011 ). Following Biber (1988) , we used a multi-dimensional analysis to identify dimensions of frequently co-occurring features that best account for cross-disciplinary variation in MICUSP. The four functional dimensions of MICUSP appear to distinguish between: (1) Involved, Academic Narrative versus Descriptive, Informational Discourse; (2) Expression of Opinions and Mental Processes; (3) Situation-Dependent, Non-Procedural Evaluation versus Procedural Discourse; and (4) Production of Possibility Statement and Argumentation. Along with a description of the methodology, this paper defines the features that constitute the factors, which have been labelled based on their communicative functions. Similarities and differences at the disciplinary and genre-specific levels are discussed as are the implications for discipline-specific and register-based pedagogies. </jats:p

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Revealing disciplinary variation in student writing: a multi-dimensional analysis of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

Revealing disciplinary variation in student writing: a multi-dimensional analysis of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

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