APU

APU

‘The art of writing English’: A corpus of schoolchildren’s writings

An ongoing debate within the field of Educational Linguistics in the UK is how to maintain and/or improve standards in writing performance in primary and secondary schoolchildren. The aim of this project is to contribute to the field in two ways: (i) by developing a large-scale diachronic corpus of schoolchildren’s writings — the APU Writing and Reading Corpus 1979-1988 —, with data retrieved from the Assessment of Performance Unit Language Surveys Archive (1979-1988), currently stored at the University of Liverpool; and (ii) by carrying out two case studies on children’s writing performance based on the above-mentioned APU corpus compilation (on the complexity of Noun Phrases, case-study 1) and the legacy of eighteenth-century ‘standards’ with regard to the morpho-syntax of English, case-study 2). This project has been funded by the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria, Xunta de Galicia, (Proxectos Emerxentes, Grant EM2014/028).