This collection contains 750 pieces of proficient assessed student writing in the disciplinary area of social sciences. It is a sub-collection of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.

The BAWE collection was designed to fill a gap in current corpus resources by complementing other writing collections which represent expertly written academic texts or non-discipline specific student texts. Student assessed writing is a particularly ‘occluded’ area, because participants don’t usually seemany examples of it – some students never read any assessed work except their own.

Thirteen broad ‘genre families’ have been identified in the corpus, including the ‘essay’, of course, and writing generically similar to the published research article, but also other types of writing reflecting other purposes of university study. The developers of BAWE chose their own names for these genre families, because departmental nomenclature tends to be inconsistent.

The BAWE collection was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), with funding from the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800).