Two MA dissertations submitted!

The APU Writing and Reading Corpus has proven a valuable datasource for research carried out in two MA dissertations at the University of Vigo. 

'Write-wrote-written?' - Verb forms in the preterite and past participle in schoolchildren’s writings. The study by Adriana Pérez-Pazo focuses on children's performance regarding the use of verbs and paying special attention to the preterite and past participle forms. Her approach takes three strands: (i) linguistic analysis of sic-hits of any verb in terms of 'form' and 'context'; (ii) analysis of variation in relation to extralinguistic factors such as Year, Sex, Type of Task and Attainment Band; and (iii) historical comparison with the usage trends and the prescriptive norms reported in Oldireva-Gustaffson (2002).

‘Low standards’ and the National Curriculum in Primary Education in the UK. A Multi-Dimensional Approach. The study by Nair Melo-Pazos investigates children’s performance in relation to adult writings as reported in Biber's works on dimensions of variation (1988, 1995, 2002). The focus lies in Dimension 2 'Narrative vs. Non-narrative Discourse', related to the APU writing task 'Story', and in Dimension 4 'Overt Expression of Argumentation', related to the APU writing task 'Rule'. The analyses are based on the data retrieved from the Multi-Dimensional Analysis Tagger created by Andrea Nini (2013), including variation in terms of text-type, genre, and linguistic features. The study has considered change over time (1979-1988) and variation according to pupil's sex.