Gonzalez-Diaz, Victorina 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8856-342X and Yanez-Bouza, Nuria ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5156-8235
(2023)
The APU Writing and Reading Corpus 1979-1988.
[Data Collection]
Description
The APU Writing and Reading Corpus 1979–1988 is a diachronic corpus of British English schoolchildren’s data at Year 6-level (primary school, 10-11 year-olds). The materials are based on a sample of the Language Performance Surveys carried out from 1979 to 1988 by the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU), UK National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). More specifically, the APU corpus consists of two major components: writings by children (what we have called “School Scripts”) and writings for children (what we have called “Basal Readers”, in line with work by Biber and associates (Reppen 1994, Biber et al. 2002)). The School scripts contains two different types of text-types: argumentative-cum-persuasive writing and narrative writing. Overall, they amount to 522 scripts and 92,728 words distributed as shown in Table 1. Table 1. Distribution of School Scripts across time No. words argumentative No. of words narrative 1979 12,667 28,067 1988 16,078 35,926 The selection of the “Basal Readers” component includes 13 fiction and non-fiction (informative) readers used in the APU Surveys. These are excerpts taken from published children’s books dating from 1979, 1982 and 1988. These sources amount to ca. 15,500 words. All but two basal readers are British sources. The two printed in US are the NFER basal reader “The Flying Machine” and the supplementary source “The Golden Apples of the Sun”. For a full description of the contents and distribution of the corpus, please see the APU manual (See ReadMe file).
| Keywords: | school children, writing, corpus, UK, historical, primary school, KS1 |
|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts > English |
| Depositing User: | Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Oct 2023 09:52 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Oct 2023 09:52 |
| DOI: | 10.17638/datacat.liverpool.ac.uk/2456 |
| URI: | https://datacat.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/2456 |
Available Files
Data
Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 |
