Duygu Candarli

This chapter reviews the literature relating to teaching and learning the language of mathematics and presents key feature and keywords analyses in the Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 3 (KS3) mathematics sub-corpora. Key feature analysis showed that the language of KS2 and KS3 mathematics teaching reflects the current guidance and policy for mathematics education with regard to topics like comparison and algebra. Mathematical symbols, nominalisations and gerunds/present participles were found to be more frequent in the KS3 mathematics sub-corpus than in the KS2 mathematics sub-corpus. KS3 mathematics is more multisemiotic and involves more abstract language than KS2 mathematics. Keywords analysis showed that KS3 mathematics relied on polysemous words that were used with domain-specific meanings, abstract concepts and more phrasal language features to a greater extent than KS2 mathematics. These features of language require complex processing and may be unfamiliar to many secondary students in Year 7. This constellation of complex linguistic features may make accessing mathematics more challenging for students at the beginning of secondary school.

Corpus linguistics is a powerful methodology, which facilitates fine-grained analysis of large-scale language data, and the project uses a range of corpus linguistics methods. This chapter introduces our corpus of school language registers and the corpus linguistics methods used in the book. The collection and construction of our corpus are also discussed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus designed to represent the school language that students encounter during the transition period from primary to secondary school. Teachers at 13 participating schools provided a range of written materials designed for teaching Years 5–8 (assessments, lesson presentations, reading extracts, textbooks, worksheets and glossaries) and took part in lesson recordings (Years 5–8). Materials were collected from the three core disciplines – English, mathematics and science – and two humanities disciplines – history and geography. Throughout this book, a range of corpus linguistics methods, including multi-dimensional analysis, concordance analysis and keyword and key feature analysis are applied to our corpora, to identify and examine how vocabulary, grammar and other linguistic features were used in teaching across and within disciplines, before and after the transition from primary to secondary school.

In this chapter, the key findings of the book are summarised. The themes that have recurred across all the studies have been register, polysemy, purpose and context. The overall challenge of these for students starting secondary school is considered and ways forward for research are suggested. The project continues to work with school practitioners to develop awareness and consider implications for the transition years.

Multi-dimensional (MD) analysis allows researchers to investigate the co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features and their underlying communicative functions in a corpus. MD analysis enabled insights into the specific functions that characterise different disciplinary registers and the kinds of language schoolchildren must be able to understand to access school language registers. In this chapter, additive MD analysis was used to identify functional variation across and within disciplines in our Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 3 (KS3) written sub-corpora of English, mathematics and science before and after the transition. The language of science was found to become significantly more informationally dense and significantly less narrative in KS3 than in KS2. The language of mathematics and English became more explicit and elaborated in KS3 in comparison with KS2. All disciplines were found to use non-persuasive and non-impersonal language. Few differences were found in terms of non-/impersonality and expression of persuasion across key stages for each discipline. Implications for future research and teaching are discussed.

This book provides a unique analysis and description of the linguistic challenges faced by school students as they move from primary to secondary school, a major transition, which some students struggle with emotionally and academically. The study: • draws on a bespoke corpus of 2.5 million words of written materials and transcribed classroom recordings, provided by the project's partner schools; • combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to the corpus data to explore linguistic variation across school levels, registers and subjects; • describes the procedures of corpus compilation and analysis of written and spoken academic language, showing how modern corpus tools can be applied to this far-reaching social and educational issue; • uncovers differences and similarities between the academic language that school children are exposed to at primary and secondary school, contrasting this against the backdrop of the non-academic language that they encounter outside school. This book is important reading for advanced students and researchers in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics and teacher education. It carries implications for policymakers and schools looking to support students at this critical point in their schooling.