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Article published In: Corpus Linguistics and Education in Australia
Edited by Alexandra Garcia Murrago, Peter Crosthwaite and Monika Bednarek
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 43:2] 2020
► pp. 117–144

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Ten years of print media coverage of NAPLAN

A corpus-assisted assessment

 | The University of Sydney
Published online: 3 July 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.19047.moc
Abstract
The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool​.edu​.au,
which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy. This paper uses a corpus-assisted approach to map print media representations of NAPLAN over the first decade of the Program, from 2008 to 2018. Building on previous work on NAPLAN and the print media (Mockler, N. (2013). Reporting the ‘education revolution’: MySchool.edu.au in the print media. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 1–16.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2016). NAPLAN and the problem frame: Exploring representations of NAPLAN in the print media, 2010 and 2013. In B. Lingard, S. Sellar, & G. Thompson (Eds.), National testing in schools: An Australian assessment (pp. 181–198). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), it draws on a corpus of almost 6,000 articles from the Australian national and capital city daily newspapers published between 2008 and 2018. It charts the discursive shifts that have taken place over this period as NAPLAN has transitioned in the public space from a diagnostic tool seen to be useful to educators, to a comparative tool seen to be useful to parents and the general public, and more recently to a contested tool seen to have narrow or limited utility.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context and approach
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1The NAPLAN corpus
    • 3.2Analysis
  • 4.Keywords in the NAPLAN corpus
  • 5.Changing discourses of NAPLAN
    • 5.1Keywords and change over time
    • 5.2Diachronic keywords
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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