The Corpus & Repository of Writing (Crow) is an archive of undergraduate student writing designed to support research, teaching, and professional development in writing studies. The corpus and repository holds over 18,000 texts, totalling approximately 18 million words, produced by students enrolled in first-year writing courses from Fall 2009 to Summer 2022.
In addition to texts, Crow includes detailed contextual metadata such as course, assignment type, and semester of writing. It also integrates a linked repository of instructional materials (e.g., syllabi, assignments, rubrics) that allows researchers to examine connections between pedagogies and student writing outcomes.
The CROW corpus was developed by researchers affiliated with the University of Arizona, Purdue University, and Northern Arizona University. It is closely connected to the Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech (MACAWS), which was developed to extend corpus-based research to multilingual writing and speech.
Crow is hosted on an online platform: https://crow.corporaproject.org/
Individual researchers and institutions must request access by completing the registration form: https://api.corporaproject.org/user/register
Access to the corpus can be requested in multiple formats:
Downloadable instructional materials in markdown format, including assignment prompts, syllabi, rubrics, lesson plans, and related course documents.
Offline research corpus subset available as a downloadable ZIP file, enabling secure local analysis (additional training and verification required)
CROW is well-suited for large-scale computational studies of student writing, especially for exploratory analysis of keywords across differing institutions, courses, assignments, and years.
Keywords and Lemmas in Context (in repository): Search the online repository for keyword-in-context records and downloadable CSV files with demographic and corpus metadata. https://crow.corporaproject.org/authorize?destination=corpus
Revision Differences (no coding required): In the right sidebar of individual text results, each draft from the same paper will be listed, if available. Authenticated users access can download each version and use tools such as Diffchecker or Diffmerge to highlight differences between drafts. https://crow.corporaproject.org/page/teachers
Demographic Patterns in RStudio: Exported corpus data can be analyzed in RStudio to explore trends across metadata fields such as institution, assignment, course level, and student background. https://crow.corporaproject.org/page/researchers#export
Gao, W., Picoral, A., & Staples, R. (2021). Citation practices of L2 writers in first-year writing courses: Form, rhetorical function, and connection with pedagogical materials. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2021.100005
Kwon, H., Partridge, R. S., & Staples, S. (2018). Building a local learner corpus: Construction of a first- year ESL writing corpus for research, teaching, mentoring, and collaboration. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 4(1), 112-127. https://benjamins.com/catalog/ijlcr.16017.kwo
Kwon, H., Staples, S. & Partridge, R. S. (2018). Source work in the first-year L2 writing classroom: Undergraduate L2 writers’ use of reporting verbs. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 34, 86-96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.04.001
Lan, G., & Sun, Y. (2019). A corpus-based investigation of noun phrase complexity in the L2 writings of a first-year composition course. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 38, 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.12.001
Picoral, A., Staples, S., & Reppen, R. (2021). Automated annotation of learner English. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 7(1), 17–52. https://10.1075/ijlcr.20003.pic
Shin, J. (2021). The use of stance in L2 first-year college writing: Its relation to genre, revision, and writer characteristics. In M. Charles & A. Frankenberg-Garcia (Eds.), Corpora in ESP/EAP writing instruction (pp. 123-146). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003001966-6-10/use-stance-l2-first-year-college-writing-ji-young-shin