Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics: Online-First ArticlesDevelopmental corpus insights into the writing life of a primary school child in Australia
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.
Keywords: children’s writing, family writing intervention, writing self, developmental learner corpora, parental dilemma
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
-
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