What can a corpus tell us about school writing? Findings, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Much child corpus research has focused on the language of school writing. In the first part of this paper, I discuss what this work can contribute to theory and educational practice. I then look in detail at a recent large-scale study conducted in England in order to illustrate, and critically discuss, key corpus methods and findings. In the final part of the paper, I discuss prospects for future work, focusing in particular on the issue of defining and analysing educational text types. I look at why this task is so central to valid research on school writing and why it has been so problematic, despite decades of attention from researchers. I then introduce and discuss the prospects for one promising approach to such analysis.