What can a corpus tell us about school writing? Findings, challenges, and future directions

Much child corpus research has focused on the language of school writing. In the first part of this paper, I discuss what this work can contribute to theory and educational practice. I then look in detail at a recent large-scale study conducted in England in order to illustrate, and critically discuss, key corpus methods and findings. In the final part of the paper, I discuss prospects for future work, focusing in particular on the issue of defining and analysing educational text types. I look at why this task is so central to valid research on school writing and why it has been so problematic, despite decades of attention from researchers. I then introduce and discuss the prospects for one promising approach to such analysis.