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Article published In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 47:1 (2024) ► pp.27–50

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Developmental corpus insights into the writing life of a primary school child in Australia

ORCiD logo with link | The University of QueenslandBrisbane
ORCiD logo with link | The University of QueenslandBrisbane
Published online: 14 October 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.21062.ham
Abstract
Children’s writing development is a matter of concern for Australian and other education systems. Factors related to the nature of writing as a literate skill, school writing pedagogy, and diminishing role of writing in a screen-dominant environment may account for this educational concern. What happens in a child’s writing when immigrant parents assign them writing tasks at home taking into account their writing concerns compounded by their family linguacultural backgrounds in an English-only environment? This paper presents developmental corpus analyses involving data taken from a 1.5-year family writing intervention program for a primary school immigrant child, using multidimensional analysis to determine the latent linguistic traits characteristic of the child’s writing development over time. The findings illustrate a range of linguistic features comprising four main dimensions representative of the child’s writing development, together with a focus on the emergence of his written self. Although the findings provide data-driven developmental insights into the child’s writing life, the parental intervention itself presented ethical dilemmas.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A family ‘writing intervention’ program
  • 3.Research on children’s writing ability and writing development
  • 4.Children’s writing products and corpus studies of writing development
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Corpus construction
    • 5.2Analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Dimension 1: Providing elaboration through clauses
    • 6.2Dimension 2: Making directives and predictions
    • 6.3Dimension 3: Talking about others versus talking to the reader
    • 6.4Dimension 4: Intimate versus informational interaction
  • 7.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Hamid, M. Obaidul & Iffat Jahan
2023. Learning to write or writing to resist? A primary school child's response to a family writing intervention. Linguistics and Education 78 ► pp. 101249 ff. DOI logo

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