USE–The Uppsala Student English Corpus: an instrument for needs analysis

a corpus of learner English is currently being compiled. The project has been running for a year – the two academic terms of 1999 – and is planned to proceed for another two years. The corpus consists of essays written by the department's students of English, the majority in their first term of full-time studies of the subject. The project has attracted a large number of participants, who hand in their 700-word essays on diskettes or online to project leaders Margareta Westergren Axelsson and Ylva Berglund. The present size of the corpus is about 600,000 words. At the current rate of student participation, we can look forward to a collection of texts comprising close to two million words by the end of the project period. Unlike other corpora of learner English, which mainly serve purposes of research into the nature of learner English, the USE Corpus has a double aim. One aim, perhaps the most important one for the department, is for the corpus to serve as an instrument for diagnosing the language difficulties our students experience at different levels. To have access to such an instrument is of great value in times of shrinking resources for language studies. Swedish university students of English normally reach a high level of spoken proficiency and good communicative competence even in upper secondary school. What is lacking is a good command of the written medium, with its demands on greater precision, variation and stylistic awareness. This observation, however, does not entail knowledge of the exact extent and nature of the problems experienced by students in their writing. The USE Corpus can provide us with a more accurate picture , revealing the details that are important for instruction focused on the most pressing needs. Of course, a needs analysis cannot be carried out without some systematic research. Therefore, another aim is to carry out didactic research on the corpus material. So far, a half-time position is allocated to corpus collection and