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Individual Project & Presentation (30%); Either Week 11 (first 12 or 13 students in the Attendance list); Week 12 (the other half of class)
Start date: 25 January 2023; End date: 11pm, Wednesday 3 Apr 2023 (Week 11 – for both written paper, workings and PPTX)
Write an original paper ofup to 3000 words (including the biblio; corpus/data should be in a separate file) on the theme of
“A corpus linguistic investigation of X”
in which X should be specialized English or a specific genre primarily in English, i.e. “racist discourse in the English-X website”, “Jane Austen’s concept of “pride”, etc. While national varieties of English (e.g. U.K. English, U.S. English etc.) are not primarily the focus (since they have been examined in the group projects), you can still touch on the properties of general English.
This project is an opportunity to reflect on worthwhile specific hypotheses/questions, find patterns in complicated data, develop your argumentation, and hone your presentation skills.
[cf the NUS Registrar’s note on 9 Feb 2023: In light of ChatGPT and other AI tools, please declare if/how they have been used for the paper. The parts that have utilized the software should be highlighted in emerald green, and underlined].
What is an “original” paper? It should not have been written for another course elsewhere (e.g. during one’s undergraduate years) and, with some modification, submitted for this course.This is called self-plagiarism:
Self-plagiarism according to the University
“The concept of self-plagiarism is the act of reusing a piece of work already submitted for another class or publication without acknowledging or citing the earlier submission. It can involve reusing data, copying or paraphrasing text or ideas from an earlier piece of work completed by the author him/herself. Where possible, a student should always refrain from reusing the same piece of work more than once. If there remains a need to reuse material from the same piece of work, the student should always discuss with his/her supervisor or lecturer first. The responsibility is on the student to acknowledge, cite and specify what portions of the work have been previously submitted or published, and to clarify his/her relative contribution to that piece of work, if it was a co-authored submission or publication.”
Plagiarism(whether from the Web or in print) is taken very seriously - if you take someone's words, please incorporate them in quotes (i.e. " ") and provide the proper citation; someone's idea must also be credited to them.
Please further observe the following guidelines:
i) Try to search for a free ‘ready-made’ corpus (e.g. a corpus of Trump’s speeches is available for free!) that can be subjected to analysis using Antconc (essential) and Wmatrix (essential). You should complement this corpus with a larger one, such as the BYU range of corpora – if it os applicable. For instance, if your project is “A corpus linguistic investigation of the Covid- 19 situation in Singapore”, you could collect a corpus and complement it with the BYU CoronaVirus corpus. But, do not just use the BYU corpus in which Wmatrix and Antconc are bypassed.
ii) Write a short proposal in no more than 500 words to the Instructor (see Assignment folder) by Session 5.
ii) Each presentation should take up to 10 minutes – highlight the main findings from your study. Even if your presentation only in Week 12, instead of Week 11, please include your final PPTX version when you submit the project at 11pm, Wednesday 3 Apr 2024.
iii) ) The project will be judged on both content (originality, innovativeness, soundness of judgment in interpreting data, adherence to standard English) and form (clear delivery, no typological infelicities in the powerpoint, etc). There will be no breakdown in these two components.
iv) Please submit the MS-Word (not pdf) writeup in the format “ELC5216 Individual-
Yourname.docx”, Microsoft Powerpoint, and other workings (electronic corpus, concordances, frequency lists) in a zipfile to the Canvas Assignment folder created for this purpose.