Written school language registers at the transition

Multi-dimensional (MD) analysis allows researchers to investigate the co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features and their underlying communicative functions in a corpus. MD analysis enabled insights into the specific functions that characterise different disciplinary registers and the kinds of language schoolchildren must be able to understand to access school language registers. In this chapter, additive MD analysis was used to identify functional variation across and within disciplines in our Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 3 (KS3) written sub-corpora of English, mathematics and science before and after the transition. The language of science was found to become significantly more informationally dense and significantly less narrative in KS3 than in KS2. The language of mathematics and English became more explicit and elaborated in KS3 in comparison with KS2. All disciplines were found to use non-persuasive and non-impersonal language. Few differences were found in terms of non-/impersonality and expression of persuasion across key stages for each discipline. Implications for future research and teaching are discussed.