Corpus of Turkish Undergraduate Writers of English (TUWE)
Description
The Turkish Undergraduate Writers of English (TUWE, hereafter) corpus is a learner corpus compiled at Erciyes University in Turkey for research purposes, which is expected to contribute to teaching plans and practices of L2 learners, especially for the Turkish ones, both in local and international contexts. Not only can the examination of TUWE provide us a better understanding of the interlanguage issues (i.e. grammar, vocabulary choice) but also it can allow the practitioners and researchers aiming to develop materials and design tasks for language classes by taking performances of L2 users. The corpus includes ''341 argumentative essays'' written by Turkish speakers of English at tertiary with proficiency level of upper-intermediate. The learners were all young adult undergraduate students majoring in English Language Teaching to become teachers and practitioners. They were first-and second-year undergraduate students enrolled in either Advanced Reading and Writing or Process Writing classes. The total number of words in the corpus is approximately 270.000 words, which can be considered as a medium-sized specialized learner corpus. The topics of the essays range from 'Population explosion' and 'Migration' to 'Parenting' and 'Job selection'. The reason why learners were asked to write on such broad topics is linked to make them express their opinions without much research on the topics, at least not as much as is required by academic writing on an academic topic. The learners completed their essays on the given topic by following the Process Approach in writing, which gives a chance to go back and forth in their writing to draft, revise and submit the work.