The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus is a collection of texts produced by undergraduate and Master's students in a wide range of disciplines, for assessment as part of taught degree programmes undertaken in the UK. The majority of the contributors to the corpus are mother tongue speakers of English, but, in order to be included in the corpus, each assignment had to be judged proficient by assessors in the contributor's discipline, regardless of the writer's mother tongue. The corpus contains, therefore, only texts that have met departmental requirements for the given level of study. University writing programmes are typically aimed at undergraduate and Master's students, and it would be useful for writing tutors to know more about student assignment genres and the linguistic features of successful writing at undergraduate and Master's level. However, most large-scale descriptive studies of academic writing focus on published or publicly accessible texts, or learner essays on general academic topics, probably because there are practical difficulties associated with collecting large amounts of well-documented student output. This paper charts the experience of collecting data for the BAWE corpus, highlighting the problems we encountered and the solutions we chose, with a view to facilitating the task of future developers of academic student writing corpora.

Background: Disparity of attainment between different groups of students in UK higher education has been correlated with ethnicity (UUK & NUS, 2019). For example, students who declared their ethnicity as Black were 20% less likely to graduate with a top classification than those who declared their ethnicity as White (OfS, 2018a). The causes of such attainment gaps are complex, and one important factor may be the nature of the feedback given by academic staff on assignments written by different groups of students. This paper aims to explore the feasibility of investigating this hypothesis by analyzing written feedback and looking for patterns in feedback given to different groups of students.• Discussion: Although the data was insufficient to focus on ethnicity, intersectionality, and attainment, it is possible to differentiate the nature of the feedback-including engagement-based on contextual variables.• Conclusions: The positive results show that the framework (RQ1) and the methodology (RQ2) have been successfully developed for this limited dataset and merit application in the analysis of a larger data set to explore the complex relationships between WFI, ethnicity, and attainment.

Humour is one of the most difficult pragmatic devices for lecturers and students to engage with, and for researchers to identify systematically. Humour does not always travel well across cultures. It can cause particular problems of miscommunication for the lecturers delivering and students receiving it in unfamiliar cultural contexts. This paper demonstrates the use of pragmatic annotation for mapping the distribution, duration and specific function of humour based on nine attributed types. The analysis looks at 76 English-medium lectures from the UK, Malaysia and New Zealand, which form part of the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC). Differences in preferred humour type, amount, and laughter response rate are evident across the three cultural subcorpora. In the increasingly globalised academic setting, understanding of such cultural differences is important to all academics and students on the move.

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There is no single, universally accepted method of measuring isometric neck strength to inform exercise prescription and injury risk prediction. This study aimed to establish the inter- and intra-rater reliability of a commercially available fixed frame dynamometer in measuring peak isometric neck strength. A convenience sample of male (n = 16) and female (n = 20) university students performed maximal isometric contractions for flexion (Flex), extension (Ext), left- (LSF) and right-side flexion (RSF) in a quadruped position over three sessions. The intra-rater reliability results were good-to-excellent for both males (ICC = 0.83–0.90) and females (ICC = 0.86–0.94) and acceptable (CV < 15%) across all directions for both males and females. The inter-rater reliability results were excellent (ICC = 0.96–0.97) and acceptable (CV < 11.1%) across all directions. Findings demonstrated a significant effect for sex (p ≤ 0.05): males were stronger in all four directions, and a significant effect for direction (p ≤ 0.05): Ext tested stronger (193 N) than Flex (176 N), LSF (130 N) and RSF (125 N). The findings show that the VALD fixed frame dynamometer can reliably assess isometric neck strength and can provides reference values for healthy males and females.