Dr Phil Durrant (University of Exeter) "Growth in Grammar: A multi-dimensional analysis of student writing between five and sixteen"

Our research team is establishing a corpus of writing from English, History and Science classes produced by children from ages 5 to 16 at schools across England. We will use this corpus to try to understand how children’s language changes as they get older, what linguistic features distinguish higher- from lower-quality writing and how children at different ages shape their language use according to the disciplines and genres they are writing in. In this talk, Dr Durrant will describe the background to the study, what we already know about this area, our methods, and prospects for future work.