QU partners with universities to launch bilingual argumentative writing corpus

Qatar University, in partnership with the University of Exeter (UoE) in the UK and Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) has launched the Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing.This innovative research project is part of Qatar's National Vision 2030, which emphasises human development. This three-year National Priorities Research Programme funded by the Qatar National Research Fund from 2019 to 2022, has culminated in a comprehensive bilingual writing corpus. The Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing focuses on the argumentative writing skills of Qatari university students in their first language, Arabic and second language, English.The primary goals of this project were to build the Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing and analyse students' use of metadiscourse and voice markers in both Arabic and English. It also aims to understand students' metalinguistic awareness of their usage of these rhetorical devices. Metadiscourse and voice markers refer to the linguistic methods writers use to project themselves into their writing, signal their stance, and to engage readers.By examining texts from a diverse academic background, the corpus provides rich insights into the bilingual writing process, revealing patterns in language use. This invaluable resource aids researchers, Arabic and English educators, and corpus linguists in informing teaching methods and cross-linguistic studies in a bilingual environment.The project involved experts from QU, UoE, and HBKU. It was led by Dr Abdelhamid Ahmed, an assistant professor in English Language Education at the core curriculum programme at QU. The Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing was developed in partnership with an expert team comprising Prof Debra Myhill, Professor Emerita of Language and Literacy Education, and Dr Esmaeel Abdollahzadeh, senior lecturer in language education from the School of Education at UoE. Additionally, Dr Wajdi Zaghouani, an associate professor in Digital Humanities at HBKU, contributed his expertise.The Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing consists of approximately 200,000 tokens of argumentative writing by Qatari university students in Arabic and English. The corpus contains 195 argumentative essays in Arabic and 195 in English, written by the same group of students (159 females and 36 males) on diverse topics. The students, native Arabic speakers proficient in English as a second language, provide a unique bilingual data set.