The aims of the BAWESS project are nothing if not ambitious. With the help of our many fantastic participating schools, we are collecting thousands of examples of secondary school student writing, transcribing them into a digital database (‘The BAWESS Corpus’) of over one-million words in size. We will soon start analysing the data to find out what quality academic writing looks like across disciplines.
But how do you go about analysing one million words of student writing? What are the approaches and tools available to researchers to take on such a daunting task? To gain in-depth understanding of students’ disciplinary literacy on such a large scale, there is both a ‘broad’, quantitative approach and a ‘deep’, qualitative approach available to researchers. Here, we give an outline of these two options:
Corpus Linguistics: A broad, quantitative approach to analysing large sets of textual data. Corpus linguistics is a methodological approach to analysing language that uses specialist computer software to explore large amounts of linguistic data. By combining texts into a digitised corpus, researchers can identify the frequencies and patterns of words, phrases and grammatical structures present. It also allows the comparison of how these frequencies and patterns might be similar or vary between different types of writing (e.g., science writing vs history writing), or how student writing develops over time (such as GCSE writing to A level writing).
The pedagogical benefit of a corpus-assisted approach to student writing is that it allows researchers to identify issues such as common errors, vocabulary range and how students express stance and structure arguments across various disciplines and stages of writing development.
Ultimately, a corpus-assisted approach to analysing student writing provides rigorous, measurable and evidence-based findings which arise from real-life examples.
Systemic Functional Linguistics: A deep, qualitative dive into how language is used to make meaning at the level of the individual text and the patterns that exist across texts. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a comprehensive theory which views language as a system of choices used by people to make meaning in context in order to achieve a communicative goal. SFL analyses are based around three principal aspects of language:
- Ideational – how language represents ideas, content, and experience.
- Interpersonal – how language enacts relationships, stance, and attitude.
- Textual – how language creates coherent, well-organised texts.
SFL is widely used in education because it offers a clear, teachable way to understand writing quality. For example, it provides a framework to examine:
- The ideational aspect: how students express ideas, their use of appropriate processes (verbs), participants (nouns), and circumstances (adverbials).
- Interpersonal aspect: The students’ use of register, evaluation and formality, to engage with the intended reader/listener.
- The textual aspect: The students’ organisation of their written work, their use of cohesive devices and reference to link ideas, and how texts are structured according to their genres (e.g., argument, report, story).
Overall, SFL is a powerful tool for identifying strengths and weaknesses in student writing, and provides an instructional scaffold for teaching genre, grammar and cohesion effectively.
Methods, the BAWESS project and our 3rd Disciplinary Literacy symposium
We look forward to employing both the quantitative method of corpus linguistics and the qualitative method of SFL to our BAWESS corpus of texts to develop new insights into student writing at the secondary school level.
If you have found this summary interesting and would like to learn more about how your school can get involved with the project to contribute data and enjoy the benefits of partnership, follow the link to our project website here, or email the team on bawess@bath.ac.uk
If you would like to learn more about corpus linguistics, some prominent researchers employing this method to analysing student writing are Phil Durrant, Hilary Nesi and Dana Therova. Some well-known researchers who take an SFL approach to analysing student writing are Meg Gebhard, Gail Forey, and Maria Brisk. The University of Bath will be welcoming these experts, and many others, to talk at the 3rd Disciplinary Literacy symposium on the 17th and 18th of June. Follow the link here for more details and a full list of speakers on our university webpage. This is a hybrid event, with lunch and refreshments provided for in-person guests, and tickets starting from £25.
We look forward to welcoming you to Bath in June!
