The linguistic challenges of the transition from primary to secondary school

该项目通过一系列详细和雄心勃勃的语言和话语分析研究，推动了教育注册和学术语言的研究。它将产生一个关于学术语言的大量知识体系，学生们需要这些知识才能进入英国的早期中学课程。比较研究将表明这与小学的学术语言以及学校以外公共领域的语言使用有何不同。有充分的证据表明，许多学生发现从小学到中学的过渡很困难。在中学的头几年，儿童在所有能力水平上的成就和动力表现往往有所下降，部分原因是社会原因，例如加入一个大得多的学校，朋友群体的变化等。学生面临的新的学术和语言要求也起着非常重要的作用。语言是学习课程的关键。我们关注的是英语为母语的人，而不是第二语言的人所面临的具体问题；我们采访的老师证实了文献中的报道，即许多以英语为母语的学生缺乏进入中学课程所需的语言。大多数学校都提供补习语言，并有各种文本和网络语言支持资源。然而，这些并没有利用严格的学校语言；到目前为止，还没有大规模的系统研究可以提供这样的解释。本项目将使用语料库语言学学科的创新计算技术来解决这一差距。我们已经开始与教师合作，确定哪些内容应该纳入书面和口头文本（“语料库”），这些语料库可以代表学生在学校教育的不同阶段和不同学科中遇到的学术语言。该项目将通过采访和研讨会的方式继续对教师和学生开展这项工作。我们将从我们的合作学校收集文本，这些学校位于约克郡地区和伯明翰的一系列社会经济多样化的社区。这些将用来建立两个语料库，分别代表小学晚期和中学早期的学术语言经验。每个将由大约1,000,000个单词组成，并将以机器可读的形式安全地存储。第三个数据来源将是现有语料库的组成部分，这些语料库被选为学生校外“公共”语言经验的近似代表，例如小说、杂志、网站和社交媒体。将使用语料库软件分析和比较这两个专用语料库，其中一些将专门为本项目开发。它们还将与第三个数据集进行比较。分析将识别单词层面上的差异，包括词义、搭配模式（这可以表明特定的意义和语域）和语法。使用语料库工具分析语篇模式不太容易，因此我们将对选定的文本进行人工语篇分析。正在进行的访谈和研讨会将为我们的分析提供信息，并将帮助我们了解学生如何经历这种转变，以及教师如何看待这种转变。该项目将对中学的学术语言进行系统描述，并说明其与小学语言和校外公共语言的不同之处。它将为不同的读者提供不同的版本，包括对教育登记册有专业兴趣的学术读者、材料作者、课堂教师和教学助理。教师和学生将从早期阶段开始参与，作为项目的贡献者，并建立自己的研究能力和知识基础。

The project moves forward research in educational registers and academic language through a set of detailed and ambitious linguistic and discourse analytic studies. It will generate a substantial body of knowledge about the academic language that students need in order to access the early secondary school curriculum in England. Comparative studies will show how this differs from the academic language of primary school, and from language use in public domains outside school. It is well documented that many students find the transition from primary to secondary school difficult. In the first years of secondary school, there is often a drop in attainment and motivation in the performance of children at all ability levels, partly for social reasons, such as joining a much larger school, changes in friendship groups, etc. The new academic and linguistic demands that students face also play a very important part. Language is central in enabling or preventing access to the curriculum. We are concerned with native speakers of English rather than the specific issues faced by second language speakers; the teachers we have spoken to confirm reports from the literature that many native English-speaking students lack the language needed to access the secondary school curriculum. Most schools have remedial language provision, and there are various text and web-based language support resources. However, these do not draw on rigorous accounts of school language; as yet there has been no large-scale systematic study that can provide such accounts. This project will use innovative computational techniques from the discipline of corpus linguistics to address this gap. We have already begun working with teachers to identify what should go into collections of written and transcribed spoken texts ('corpora') that can represent the academic language encountered by students at different points in their schooling and in different subjects. The project will continue this work with teachers and students through interviews and workshops. We will collect texts with and from our partner schools, which are situated across a range of socio-economically diverse communities in the Yorkshire region and in Birmingham. These will be used to build two corpora representing the academic language experience of, firstly, late primary school, and, secondly, early secondary school. Each will consist of approximately 1,000,000 words and will be stored securely in machine-readable form. A third source of data will be components of existing corpora, selected as approximately representative of the 'public' language experience of students outside school, for example, fiction, magazines, websites and social media. The two purpose built corpora will be analysed and compared using corpus software, some of which will be developed specifically for this project. They will also be compared with the third dataset. The analysis will identify differences at the level of word, including word meaning and collocational patterns (which can signal specialised meaning and register) and grammar. Discourse patterns are less easy to analyse using corpus tools, so we will conduct manual discourse analyses on selected texts. Ongoing interviews and workshops will inform our analyses, and will help us to develop understandings of how the transition is experienced by students and seen by teachers. The project will produce a systematic description of the academic language of secondary school, and accounts of how this differs from the language of primary school and public language outside school. It will produce versions of this for different readerships, including academic readers with a specialist interest in educational registers, materials writers, and classroom teachers and teaching assistants. Teachers and school students will be involved from the early stages, as contributors to the project as well as building their own research capacity and knowledge base.