micusp

About the Project

Micusp 1.5 is a research project launched in 2006 by a small group of researchers at the University of Michigan's English Language Institute. We are collecting texts from writers who are just starting their academic careers at the university. Specifically, we are asking for contributions of written text from 1st and 2nd year students at the undergraduate level, who speak a variety of Korean or Chinese at home.

Generation 1.5

We are targeting two student groups:

a) students who have attended between 2 and 8 years of schooling in the US or Canada and speak Korean or Chinese at home;

b) international students from South Korea and China whose home language is not English.

The first group belongs to what is sometimes called "Generation 1.5," referring to people who have immigrated to the US at some point during their teenage years, thus becoming quite familiar with and socialized into US culture by the time they start college. At the same time, their home language is not English, and their identity has been described as "a combination of new and old culture and tradition."

The second group functions as our control group of traditional EFL students. We are collecting data from this group in order to compare the writing of Generation 1.5 students to that of traditional EFL students. We are specifically targeting students from South Korea and China, because Generation 1.5 students at the University of Michigan tend to come from those two countries.

Ultimately, the aim of this data collection is to provide an empirical basis for developing recommendations for writing/language instruction specialized for the Generation 1.5 group.