About the Generation 1.5 project

Generation 1.5, a specialized corpus project, was launched in 2006 to better understand the textual practices and discursive characteristics of University of Michigan ESL student writers. Essays have been collected from undergraduate student writers whose home language is either Korean or Chinese, with a view to describing in an empirical way the features of international and Generation 1.5 writers on our campus.

The project’s main goal is to gain a more nuanced understanding of the differences between two groups of writers on campus: International students and Generation 1.5 students. For the purposes of our research we define these groups as follows:

• International students: students from South Korea and China whose home language is not English.
• Generation 1.5 students: students who have attended between 2-8 years of US schooling and speak Chinese or Korean at home.

Papers and demographic data collected through our website provide a means to describe the writing and profiles of these two groups. Ultimately we hope our results will offer an empirical basis for developing recommendations for writing/language instruction and support for these students at our university and beyond. Currently the following rhetorical and functional features of the essays are being coded to be analyzed by a computer concordancer: How students hedge claims, integrate citations, and use informal language.