400 Compositions by EFL Learners of a University in Southwestern China (CEFLLUSC)

This is a self-built EFL learner corpus comprising 400 compositions written by 100 English program students from a University in Southwestern China. The data were collected in the first semester of the academic year 2016-2017, which was the third semester for the students. The students are from 3 classes of the course English Writing. Each student was required to write 1 composition in weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7 respectively of that semester. There are a total of 115 students in the 3 classes. To keep the consistency of the writing samples, the compositions of 15 of the students who cannot complete all the 4 writing tasks are deleted from the dataset. The corpus is made up of: 100 compositions of genre “letters”: 15,185 words 100 compositions of genre “narration”: 19,555 words 100 compositions of genre “causes & effects”: 15,903 words 100 compositions of genre “argumentation”: 17,971 words The total number of words: 68,614 words. The instructions for the 4 writing tasks are as follows: Writing Task 1 (Week 1), Letters Your aunt sent you a sweater you need. Write a thank-you letter to her. You should write more than 150 words. Writing Task 2 (Week 3), Narration Write a memorable experience in your life. You should write about 150 words. Writing Task 3 (Week 5), Causes & Effects What are the reasons why the government of a developing country may want to send students abroad (to a developed country) to study? Writing Task 4 (Week 7), Argumentation Do you think college students should or should not do part-time jobs in their spare time? Write a paragraph to state your opinion. Their compositions are required to be submitted to an English Writing correcting website (www.pigai.org), which is an intelligent online system for correcting and scoring English compositions. By comparing and analyzing students’ compositions with massive standard corpora, it can give feedback on English compositions with scores, general comments, and error correction. The students are aged from 18 to 22. Their demographic information and the writing scores are in the file "Students' Demographic Information.xls". In this file, demographic information of the students includes gender, age, ethnic group, and where they are from: rural or urban areas and the province. It also provides students’ academic performance of the semester before the semester when they wrote the 4 compositions, including final examination scores of courses such as Basic English, College Physical Education, College English Viewing and Listening, English Reading, English Phonetics, and College Chinese. Scores of the students’ writing are also provided. It should be noted that the scores are automatically generated by a writing correction system mentioned above, but not by teachers’ manual marking. Thus, the writing scores should be carefully used for research purposes.本数据集为自建的英语作为外语（English as a Foreign Language, EFL）学习者语料库，包含来自中国西南某高校100名英语项目学生撰写的400篇作文。该语料库的数据采集于2016-2017学年第一学期，此时这些学生已处于入学后的第三个学期。参与实验的学生修读《英语写作》课程，共分为3个教学班，该3个班级总共有115名学生。为保证写作样本的一致性，我们剔除了未能完成全部4次写作任务的15名学生的作文，最终纳入100名学生的习作。 该语料库的构成如下：书信类（letters）作文100篇，计15185词；记叙类（narration）作文100篇，计19555词；因果分析类（causes & effects）作文100篇，计15903词；议论类（argumentation）作文100篇，计17971词。总词量达68614词。 四次写作任务的具体要求如下： 写作任务1（第1周）：书信 你的姑姑寄来了你所需的毛衣，请给她写一封感谢信，词数不少于150词。 写作任务2（第3周）：记叙文 记叙一段你人生中难忘的经历，词数约150词。 写作任务3（第5周）：因果分析文 试分析发展中国家政府为何会派遣学生赴发达国家留学？ 写作任务4（第7周）：议论文 你认为大学生是否应当在课余时间从事兼职工作？请撰写一段文字阐述你的观点。 所有学生需将作文提交至英语写作智能批改网站（www.pigai.org），该系统是一款具备智能批改与评分功能的在线英语作文评测系统。其通过将学生作文与海量标准语料库进行比对分析，可输出作文得分、整体评语以及错误修正建议。 参与实验的学生年龄介于18至22岁之间。学生的人口统计学信息与写作得分存储于文件"Students' Demographic Information.xls"中，该文件包含以下内容：学生的性别、年龄、民族、生源地（农村/城市）及所属省份；同时收录了学生在撰写本次4篇作文的前一学期的学业成绩，包括基础英语、大学体育、大学英语视听说、英语阅读、英语语音以及大学语文等课程的期末成绩；此外还包含学生的写作得分。 需要说明的是，此处的写作得分并非由教师人工批改，而是由前文提及的智能写作批改系统自动生成，因此在科研工作中使用该得分时需谨慎考量。