Corpus data and methods

Corpus linguistics is a powerful methodology, which facilitates fine-grained analysis of large-scale language data, and the project uses a range of corpus linguistics methods. This chapter introduces our corpus of school language registers and the corpus linguistics methods used in the book. The collection and construction of our corpus are also discussed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus designed to represent the school language that students encounter during the transition period from primary to secondary school. Teachers at 13 participating schools provided a range of written materials designed for teaching Years 5–8 (assessments, lesson presentations, reading extracts, textbooks, worksheets and glossaries) and took part in lesson recordings (Years 5–8). Materials were collected from the three core disciplines – English, mathematics and science – and two humanities disciplines – history and geography. Throughout this book, a range of corpus linguistics methods, including multi-dimensional analysis, concordance analysis and keyword and key feature analysis are applied to our corpora, to identify and examine how vocabulary, grammar and other linguistic features were used in teaching across and within disciplines, before and after the transition from primary to secondary school.