First Stage in the Construction of METU Turkish English Exam Corpus (METU TEEC)

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses the first stages in the construction of the Middle East Technical University Turkish English Exam Corpus (METU TEEC), which has been compiled by a research team at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey. The corpus consists of 1914 Linguistics and ELT exam papers (955483 words in total) written in timed circumstances with no access to reference material by the students at the Foreign Language Education (FLE) department at METU, Ankara between January 2005 and December 2012. The corpus is intended to cater for the needs of both theoreticians/researchers and practitioners/pedagogues; therefore, each of the scripts included in the corpus is tagged with rich meta information about the informants (e.g., age, gender, years of learning English), the exam (e.g., course, type of question, academic year) and exam writers (e.g., educational background, experience). This system allows the compilation of sub-corpora according to the needs and interests of the researchers and practitioners. The first sections of the paper present the context and the needs for such a corpus while the latter sections discuss the development of the coding and tagging systems employed for this corpus.

Keywords

• Specialised corpus development,learner corpus,exam English,text type,Turkey and Turkish

First Stage in the Construction of METU Turkish English Exam Corpus (METU TEEC)

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses the first stages in the construction of the Middle East Technical University Turkish English Exam Corpus (METU TEEC), which has been compiled by a research team at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey. The corpus consists of 1914 Linguistics and ELT exam papers (955483 words in total) written in timed circumstances with no access to reference material by the students at the Foreign Language Education (FLE) department at METU, Ankara between January 2005 and December 2012. The corpus is intended to cater for the needs of both theoreticians/researchers and practitioners/pedagogues; therefore, each of the scripts included in the corpus is tagged with rich meta information about the informants (e.g., age, gender, years of learning English), the exam (e.g., course, type of question, academic year) and exam writers (e.g., educational background, experience). This system allows the compilation of sub-corpora according to the needs and interests of the researchers and practitioners. The first sections of the paper present the context and the needs for such a corpus while the latter sections discuss the development of the coding and tagging systems employed for this corpus

Keywords

• Specialised corpus development, learner corpus, exam English, text type, Turkey and Turkish

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