Supporting the acquisition of digital literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development

Mahlow, Cerstin

Publication type:	Conference other
Type of review:	Peer review (abstract)
Title:	Supporting the acquisition of digital literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development
Authors:	Mahlow, Cerstin
et. al:	No
Conference details:	Writing Research Across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (online), 18-23 February 2023
Issue Date:	Feb-2023
Language:	English
Subjects:	Student writing; Corpus; Writing process; Process-product
Subject (DDC):	808: Rhetoric and writing
Abstract:	Digital literacy can be understood as competence to grasp, process, reflect, and produce digital multimodal communication to create relations and to actively take part in discourses of any kind in society. The focus is often on “novel” forms of communication, but writing remains one of the main modes of communication. How the production of high-quality texts can best be supported in academic and professional contexts is an open research question. The design and implementation of interventions and teaching sequences to support students in becoming digitally literate and to successfully participate in academic and professional discourses is a challenging task. Students need to learn how to write during their studies; the focus in teaching needs to shift from the product to the process. Until now, research in this area has been hampered by the difficulty of studying the process and the product at the same time to obtain a holistic understanding of the complexities of writing. This is due to a lack of (1) appropriate methods and (2) suitable corpora. Problem (1) can be overcome by the novel concept of transforming sequences (Mahlow et al. 2022) based on changes in production mode (Mahlow 2015). This allows us to extract text and sentence histories and to study the evolution of texts on a linguistic level and to relate the process to the product. We can follow how multiword expressions, complex phrases, or coreference chains are constructed and revised. This significant step towards large-scale linguistic modeling and analysis of writing process data during writing in natural settings goes beyond word-level analyses (Leijten et al. 2019, Leijten et al. 2012) and analyses based on manual linguistic annotation (Cislaru and Olive 2018) after a writing session. To address problem (2), we are creating a new kind of writing corpus: the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development (SPPC), which will contain both process and product data, as well as feedback on drafts by supervisors, writing counselors, or peers. Although the collection and annotation of student and learner texts has a long tradition (Götz and Mukherjee 2019, 6–10), there are currently no corpora that include process data. SPPC will be created from student writing (drafts and submitted final texts) in their first language (L1) German. It complements student writing corpora like MICUSP (Römer and Swales 2010), DISKO (Wisniewski et al. 2022) or KoLaS (Andresen and Knorr 2017) in that it will include not only the product (text), but also the process data (automatically annotated and aggregated as developed in the PhD project), and information on typing and writing skills of students (based on self-reporting surveys and observations). KoLaS (https://www.korpuslab.uni-hamburg.de/projekte/kolas.html) has been created with a similar intention and also for student writing in German, but the resources (drafts and feedback comments) are only available as text files, not as explorable corpus. This resource is therefore not exploitable with corpus linguistic approaches or machine learning techniques. We will follow a different approach and store the versions of students’ texts in XML format in a dedicated XML database, namely BaseX (https://basex.org). To allow for the connection of different versions of one text and to store comments by supervisors or peers, we will use TEI (https://tei-c.org). Thus we will be able to use tools and approaches from digital humanities to explore aspects of textual genesis and annotation. Established TEI technology will also help us create visualizations to illustrate progress during writing and, more importantly, show writers and supervisors alike how students integrated comments. With this new structure and its longitudinal approach, SPPC will help us to gain insights into the development of skills and to design appropriate support for helping students become better writers.
Further description:	References: - Melanie Andresen, Dagmar Knorr (2017). KoLaS – Ein Lernendenkorpus in der Schreibberatungsausbildung einsetzen. Zeitschrift Schreiben, 5. Juli, 10–17 Georgetta Cislaru and - Thierry Olive (2018) Le processus de textualisation. Analyse des unités linguistiques de performance écrite. De Boeck Supérieur, Louvain-la-Neuve. - Sandra Götz and Joybrato Mukherjee (2019). Learner corpora and language teaching. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. - Mariëlle Leijten, Eric Van Horenbeeck, and Luuk Van Waes (2019) Analysing keystroke logging data from a linguistic perspective. In Observing writing, Eva Lindgren and Kirk Sullivan (eds.). Brill, Leiden, 71–95. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004392526_005 - Mariëlle Leijten, Lieve Macken, Veronique Hoste, Eric Van Horenbeeck, and Luuk Van Waes (2012) From character to word level: Enabling the linguistic analyses of Inputlog process data. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Writing (CL&W 2012): Linguistic and cognitive aspects of document creation and document en- gineering, 1–8. Retrieved from http://aclanthology.org/W12–0301 - Cerstin Mahlow (2015) A definition of “version” for text production data and natural language document drafts. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on (Document) Changes: Modeling, detection, storage and visualization (DChanges 2015), 27–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/2881631.2881638 - Cerstin Mahlow, Malgorzata Anna Ulasik, Don Tuggener (2022) Extraction of transforming sequences and sentence histories from writing process data: a first step towards linguistic modeling of writing. Reading and Writing. DOI 10.1007/s11145–021–10234–6 - Ute Römer and John M. Swales (2010) The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9, 3: 249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2010.04.002 - Katrin Wisniewski, Elisabeth Muntschick, and Annette Portmann (2022). Schreiben in der Studiersprache Deutsch: Das Lernerkorpus DISKO. In Sprache und Studienerfolg bei Bildungsausländer/-innen, Katrin Wisniewski, Wolfgang Lenhard, Jupp Möhring and Leonore Spiegel (eds.). Waxmann, Münster.
URI:	https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/27155
Fulltext version:	Accepted version
License (according to publishing contract):	Not specified
Departement:	Applied Linguistics
Organisational Unit:	Institute of Language Competence (ILC)
Published as part of the ZHAW project:	SPPC: Swiss Process–Product Corpus of Student Writing Development
Appears in collections:	Publikationen Angewandte Linguistik

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Mahlow, C. (2023, February). Supporting the acquisition of digital literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development. Writing Research across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (Online), 18-23 February 2023.

Mahlow, C. (2023) ‘Supporting the acquisition of digital literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development’, in Writing Research Across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (online), 18-23 February 2023.

C. Mahlow, “Supporting the acquisition of digital literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development,” in Writing Research Across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (online), 18-23 February 2023, Feb. 2023.

MAHLOW, Cerstin, 2023. Supporting the acquisition of digital literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development. In: Writing Research Across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (online), 18-23 February 2023. Conference presentation. Februar 2023

Mahlow, Cerstin. 2023. “Supporting the Acquisition of Digital Literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development.” Conference presentation. In Writing Research across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (Online), 18-23 February 2023.

Mahlow, Cerstin. “Supporting the Acquisition of Digital Literacy with the Swiss Process-Product Corpus of Student Writing Development.” Writing Research across Borders, Trondheim, Norway (Online), 18-23 February 2023, 2023.