Exploiting corpora to provide guidance for academic writing: the BAWE Quicklinks project

This chapter reports on recent developments in the BAWE Quicklinks project (Quicklinks, n.d.), an initiative offering teachers a way to help students engage with corpus data relevant to their particular writing needs. We explain how Quicklinks – hyperlinks to corpus outputs added to student work to address common written problems – represent a step forward from previous data-driven learning interventions in the important area of feedback on writing. After this comes the main focus of the chapter, which is to explore how Quicklinks can move beyond concordance data to exploit the functionality of Sketch Engine more fully. This is illustrated by means of three case studies which demonstrate the use of node form, collocation and word sketch data to address writing issues. We also discuss how the Quicklinks can be presented to students with an eye on helping them to engage with corpus data and functionality.