THE RUSSIAN LEARNER CORPUS OF ACADEMIC WRITING

Confidentiality Agreement

The purpose of this agreement is to uphold the confidentiality agreement with all users of Russian Learner Corpus of Academic Writing (RULEC). These individuals are using the data collected through Russian Learner Corpus of Academic Writing (RULEC), hereafter referred to as RULEC. Under the terms of the consent of all users, personally identifying and other sensitive information must be kept confidential. This agreement will help honor and maintain the RULEC participants’ trust and generosity and ensure that their privacy is respected.

Definitions

RULEC is a large compilation of hand-written and digital data collected from students of Russian as a Foreign Language. The original corpus was created by and belongs to Olesya Kisselev and Anna Alsufieva.  

The User is an individual who has been granted access to RULEC’s materials, which includes language data, meta-description of data and authors who produced it.

The Principal Investigators are Professor Olesya Kisselev, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Portland State University (kisselev@pdx.edu) and Professor Anna Alsufieva, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Portland State University ( alsufiev@pdx.edu ).

Code of Responsible Use

RULEC participants have placed their trust and confidence in a community of scholars to use RULEC data to understand better the processes of second and heritage language acquisition, as well as to evaluate and improve teaching methodologies and programs. This community of scholars is committed to honoring the contributions and protecting the privacy of these language learners who have generously granted their permission to use the writing samples for second language research. Beyond fulfilling the legal and ethical obligations of the participants’ consent agreements, the community of scholars wants these data to be used in a responsible manner consistent with the research and professional development academic practices. This Code of Responsible Use is designed to promote respect for the participants, maintain the integrity of the corpus data, and to facilitate collaborative sharing of research data. There is no simple list of do’s and don’ts that will serve as an infallible guide to responsible use. It is anticipated that the following initial guidelines will serve as a helpful point of departure and that the guidelines will continue to evolve within our community of scholars.

Respect for Participants

We endeavor to respect and honor the RULEC participants.  RULEC users should avoid making negative comments about individual project participants. Comments about individuals’ personal characteristics such as manner of speech or ideas expressed in writing should be made only when directly related to research or training activities. When appropriate, such characterizations of participants’ language abilities and writing skills should be made in a positive and professional manner whenever possible.  RULEC provides a record of class assignments completed by students of Russian with varying degrees of language proficiency.  

Collaboration and Sharing of Research Data

RULEC seeks to support a community of scholars of Russian language acquisition by providing broad access to the information collected from the participants. To promote this community of scholars, the RULEC encourages researchers using the corpus to share methodologies, findings and publications. The project itself consists of a large body of written texts. It is hoped that other scholars will find such data useful as they conduct their own research. Likewise, it is hoped that other scholars will contribute additional codes and transcription of the material to the collective database that is linked to RULEC. 

Written consent of the RULEC’s user

I, _____________________________, user of RULEC hereby confirm that I have read the Confidentiality agreement and agree to its terms and conditions in its entirety.  

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