This research project aims to gauge the literacy abilities and attitudes to literacy of first year students and then track their literacy and attitudinal
development as they move through second and subsequent years until graduation. The Macquarie University Student Literacy Corpus (Lit@MQ) will include a range of written student assessment tasks which will ultimately represent student writing from across all undergraduate years. The corpus will be investigated through linguistic analysis (i.e.systemic functional analysis (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and corpus analysis (Baker, 2006; Baker 2009; McEnery & Hardie, 2012; Staples, Egbert, Biber & Gray, 2016 ) and textography (Starfield, Paltridge & Ravelli, 2014).