The linguistic challenges of the transition from primary to secondary school

从小学到中学过渡的语言挑战

基本信息

批准号：
ES/R006687/1
负责人：
Alice Deignan
金额：
$ 63.63万
依托单位：
University of Leeds
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2018 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR006687%2F1
关键词：
linguistic challenges transition primary secondary

项目摘要

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.

该项目通过一系列详细且雄心勃勃的语言和话语分析研究来向教育记录和学术语言进行研究。它将产生有关学生所需的学术语言的大量知识，以便获得英格兰早期的中学课程。比较研究将表明，这与小学的学术语言以及在学校外的公共领域中的使用有何不同。有充分的文献证明，许多学生发现从小学到中学的过渡困难。在中学的头几年，在各种能力层面的儿童表现方面的成就和动力通常是出于社会原因，例如加入更大的学校，友谊群体的变化等。学生面临的新学术和语言需求也起着非常重要的作用。语言是启用或阻止访问课程的核心。我们关注的是英语的母语者，而不是第二语言讲者所面临的具体问题；我们所说的老师确认文献报道，许多讲英语的学生缺乏访问中学课程所需的语言。大多数学校都有补救措施，并且基于文本和基于Web的语言支持资源。但是，这些不利于对学校语言的严格叙述；到目前为止，还没有大规模的系统研究可以提供此类帐户。该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。我们已经开始与老师合作，以确定应该代表学生在学校和不同学科中不同地点遇到的学术语言的书面和抄录口语文本（“ coldera”）的收藏。该项目将通过访谈和讲习班继续与老师和学生一起工作。我们将收集与合作伙伴学校的文本，这些文本位于约克郡地区和伯明翰的一系列社会经济多元化社区中。这些将用于构建两个代表学术语言经验，首先是小学晚期，其次是早期中学。每个将由大约1,000,000个单词组成，并将以机器可读形式牢固地存储。第三个数据来源将是现有语料库的组成部分，被选为校外学生的“公共”语言体验的大致代表，例如小说，杂志，网站和社交媒体。将使用Corpus软件对两个目的的构建语料库进行分析和比较，其中一些将是专门为该项目开发的。它们还将与第三个数据集进行比较。该分析将在单词级别上确定差异，包括单词含义和串联模式（可以表明专业含义和注册）和语法。话语模式不太容易使用Corpus工具分析，因此我们将对选定的文本进行手动讨论分析。正在进行的访谈和讲习班将为我们的分析提供信息，并将帮助我们发展对学生如何经历过渡并被老师看到的理解。该项目将对中学的学术语言产生系统描述，并说明这与学校外的小学和公共语言的不同。它将为不同的读者生产版本，包括对教育登记册，材料作家以及课堂老师和教学助理的专业兴趣的学术读者。教师和学校的学生将从早期阶段参与其中，作为该项目的贡献者，并建立自己的研究能力和知识基础。