Victorina González-Díaz

APU project

Victorina will carry out a number of tasks in her role as Coordinator/Co-PI of the project, including:

• Safe-guarding the APU language surveys archive, which she has supervised since 2007.
• Liaison with APU-related with institutions, such as the National Foundation for Educational Research.
• Selecting the scripts that will make up the corpus.
• Application of the VARD-2 software.
• Organising an end-of-project workshop at the University of Liverpool, where we will illustrate the potential of the corpus as a research/teaching resource.
• Open lecture series in schools and educational institutions in the Liverpool area.
• Preparation of a school learning-pack based on the project’s materials, for dissemination at the workshop and the open lecture series.
• Preparation of the user manual.
• Participation in national and international conferences.
• Post-project publications.
• Maintenance of the APU website.
• Research on the linguistic abilities of Year-6 children and the extent to which they (a) mirror the perceived performance targets (as reflected in the sub-corpus of ‘writing for children’) and (b) may have changed across the selected time-span (1979–1988). The study will specifically focus on the development of complexity in the Noun Phrase, especially as regards the expansion of its modifiers. Special attention will be paid to the competition between adjectives and other nominal pre-modifiers across the data, as recent research notes that teaching materials and methods often associate adjectives with Noun Phrase pre-modification and description.