The Roadmap of Iranian Corpus of Academic Written English (ICAWE)

This paper describes the protocol designed for building a corpus of academic written English generated from the texts produced by Iranian undergraduate university students pursuing a BA in English-Persian Translation or English Language and Literature in the course of passing three basic courses in writing, which they are required to take as per the relevant curricula. These three courses include Advanced Writing, Letter Writing, and Essay Writing. The data for the said corpus, named Iranian Corpus of Academic Written English (ICAWE), will be collected from the same groups of students of the aforesaid programs. In other words, collecting data from each student begins with the first writing assignment each student submits in their Advanced Writing course, continues through their Letter Writing course, and ends with their Essay Writing final exam. Therefore, the corpus will comprise similar pieces of writing, letters, and essays written by the same learner at different points in time (e.g., before, during, and after each course), as well as different types of essays (e.g., descriptive, argumentative, etc.) written by the same learner at the same or different times. The project will be practically kicked off as of the beginning of the academic year 2016-17 and will be continued in eight phases over at least 16 years so that the corpus data will be made available at the end of each two-year phase. This paper elaborates on the roadmap drawn for the implementation of the said project and includes detailed explanations about the instances of application of learner corpora for conducting studies on academic writing, major corpora of academic writing around the world, the motivation for building the ICAWE, its annotation scheme, and the workflow and tools used for building the same. It is envisaged that this paper will prompt Iranian scholars and academics to undertake building similar learner corpora, which there is a severe paucity of in Iran.