Seminar by Dr Phil Durrant (University of Exeter) Language development in children's writing from six to sixteen

Our team has collected a corpus of approximately 3,000 educationally-authentic texts from children in schools across England from key stages one to four with the aim of under-standing what distinguishes texts written at different ages and in different genres in terms of their use of key features of syntax, vocabulary and phraseology.

The presentation will introduce the Growth in Grammar project, discussing its methodological approach and the technical challenges of creating and analysing a corpus of children's writing. It will then describe our findings to date, focusing specifically on lexical sophistication and phraseology.

Phil Durrant is Senior Lecturer in Language Education at the University of Exeter. He previously taught TESOL and English for Academic Purposes in Turkey and the UK. His research uses corpus linguistic methods to answer applied questions in first and second language education.

LEN invites all attendants to join us for a food and drinks reception following the talk.