Developmental corpus insights into the writing life of a primary school child in Australia

Bibliographic Data

ID21458412
AuthorsM Obaidul Hamid (0000-0003-3205-6124, The University of Queensland), Peter Crosthwaite (0000-0002-1482-8381, The University of Queensland)
Year2024
Volume47
Issue1
Pages27-50
Publication date2024-03-29
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Review of Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0155-0640 • E-ISSN: 1833-7139
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/aral.21062.ham
OpenAlexW4306164075
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited40

Children’s writing development is a matter of concern for Australian and other education systems. Factors related to the nature of writing as a literate skill, school writing pedagogy, and diminishing role of writing in a screen-dominant environment may account for this educational concern. What happens in a child’s writing when immigrant parents assign them writing tasks at home taking into account their writing concerns compounded by their family linguacultural backgrounds in an English-only environment? This paper presents developmental corpus analyses involving data taken from a 1.5-year family writing intervention program for a primary school immigrant child, using multidimensional analysis to determine the latent linguistic traits characteristic of the child’s writing development over time. The findings illustrate a range of linguistic features comprising four main dimensions representative of the child’s writing development, together with a focus on the emergence of his written self. Although the findings provide data-driven developmental insights into the child’s writing life, the parental intervention itself presented ethical dilemmas

Developmental psychology · Immigration · Life writing · Linguistics · Narrative · Pedagogy · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · History · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Writing and Handwriting Education