Alice Deignan

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.

The move from primary to secondary school can be challenging. Some students may show a drop in attainment following transition and, for many, their experiences of transition may have a far-reaching impact. A body of research has explored social, psychological, emotional and academic aspects of transition. Affective factors likely contribute to the challenges of transition. This chapter argues that the language children encounter in school may represent a further barrier to learning. While there is relatively little research to date specifically examining children’s language exposure before and after transition, teachers and researchers are aware that academic and disciplinary language becomes more technical throughout education and that some children struggle with the language of school. In this chapter, the context of the research is outlined. Extracts from interviews are also presented, in which children themselves can be seen to express some awareness of language that they find challenging, such as polysemy, metaphor and formal language. This book argues that by understanding the nature of the linguistic barriers to learning encountered during transition, work can be developed to mitigate their impact.

This chapter presents a review of literature on the language of science teaching and analysis of polysemy in the Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 3 (KS3) science sub-corpora. Understanding the language of science is valuable for education, but also for participation in civil life. Scientific language allows for efficient and precise thought and talk about very specific objects and phenomena and the complex relationships between them. However, many students – and possibly many adults – find the language of science alienating and inaccessible. Like mathematics, science is multisemiotic, so requires students to be able to ‘translate’ information between modalities. Previous research has focused on the unfamiliar, technical and polysemous vocabulary of science, and on how grammar and discourse structure is used to create informationally dense texts and talk that have a sense of authority and objectivity. The analyses presented here show that there is a very large increase in the number of new words and meanings encountered in KS3 compared with KS2. Polysemy with everyday meanings of words varies in degree but is extremely common overall.

In this chapter, literature relating to the teaching of English language and English literature is reviewed and a comparative analysis of the ‘aboutness’ of the language in the Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 3 (KS3) English sub-corpora and a modified version of the BNC2014 Baby+ is presented. It is argued that statutory testing and current policy may have a washback effect on English teaching, focusing on areas such as sentence grammar, meaning that activities such as reading for pleasure or developing an understanding of authorial choice and effect are relatively neglected. While inferencing is a key skill for KS3, the analyses described here found little language that would support learning about inference-making in the KS3 English sub-corpus. The language of English teaching was found to differ from everyday language. Four patterns of divergence between in-school and everyday uses of polysemous words are detailed. Differences in language used in the KS2 and KS3 sub-corpora are also described: while language in the KS2 sub-corpus deals primarily with the grammar of phrases, clauses and sentences, language in the KS3 sub-corpus tends to focus on discourse structure and the acts of writing and reading.

Academic language may be more or less accessible for different students. This chapter opens by discussing some key theoretical work which can offer some insight into why this might be the case. Parallels are drawn between Bernstein’s restricted versus elaborated codes and speech versus writing, and issues surrounding implicit teaching of academic language [skills] (CALP/CALS) alongside more everyday language (BICS) are discussed. It is acknowledged that formal, academic and written language may be valued more highly in schooling, and it is argued that this may be reductive and may play into certain social justice issues. Academic language is not simply characterised by the more technical vocabulary and grammar of written language, but rather its form is shaped by its unique functions. This chapter argues for a genre and register approach to analysing academic language. Such an approach allows for a fine-grained analysis of sub-types of academic language, including disciplinary language and the language of genres within disciplines. Some particularly challenging features of academic language found across genres and disciplines around the time of the transition 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.

Many education professionals in Britain believe that school pupils have difficulty accessing academic texts because of inadequate knowledge of vocabulary. Previous research has suggested that some high frequency words used in non-specialised contexts have academic meanings that can cause problems for school pupils. We take corpus techniques used in the study of higher education texts and apply them to a corpus of texts designed for school pupils aged 11 to 14, attempting to identify such words automatically. We use the Spoken BNC2014 as a reference corpus. We identify a list of semi-technical words (Baker, 1988), many of which are polysemous, having everyday meanings and related school subject meanings that may not be familiar to pupils. We investigate how semi-technical vocabulary can be identified and distinguished from both specialised and general vocabulary. Some supplementary qualitative analysis was needed, using collocation and concordance analysis. While time-consuming, the potential benefits for pupils struggling with school language make this a worthwhile exercise.

In this article, we show what insights can be gained by considering the relationship between expert and non-expert texts about scientific topics through the lens of ‘translation’. We focus specifically on the metaphors used to discuss climate change in a range of educational materials and in interviews with secondary school students in the UK. We show the complex web of relationships among the people and genres that may influence students’ understandings of climate change, and focus on the role of teachers in particular as ‘translators’ of scientific knowledge. We then report on several comparisons of metaphor use among texts and genres that stand in source–target relationships within this web of intralingual translations, and also consider the metaphors used by students themselves to express their understanding of climate change. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the differences we have observed, and suggest that a translation perspective can usefully highlight the challenges and potential pitfalls involved in mediating scientific knowledge for the benefit of non-experts such as school-age students.

Experts are generally in agreement that anthropogenic climate change is happening and will increase in severity, but this view is not clearly reflected in more non-specialist texts. Research has shown that school students have a limited and sometimes faulty understanding of climate change. Metaphors are used by scientists in developing thought and communicating with non-scientists; they are also used by educators. This research investigates students’ understandings of climate change by comparing metaphor use in three corpora, of research articles, student educational materials, and of transcribed interviews with school students aged 11–16 from the north of England. We find that some metaphors are shared by the three corpora; where this happens, the researchers’ use tends to be highly conventionalized and technical, while educational materials extend and explore metaphors, and the students’ use is still more creative, sometimes resulting in inaccurate descriptions of the science. Students also develop some of their own distinctive metaphors based on their immediate concrete experience, and possibly on visual educational materials; these metaphors convey highly simplified and often inaccurate understandings of climate science.

This paper presents an analysis of metaphors for punishment in policy discourse in Scotland, which has embarked on an ambitious programme of penal reform. We analysed a corpus consisting of the four key policy documents of the penal reform programme. Our objectives were firstly, to identify the most frequently used lexical metaphors and metonyms in the corpus, and then to analyse the entailments that these metaphors have, and how they frame the topics of the texts. We found widespread use of metaphors from the domain of management, providing support for the thesis that the discourse of management frames public services in the UK. We then specifically investigated the use of payback because of its salience in current penal philosophy, with the objective of finding out how frequently it is used, and whether the theme of reparation frames the texts more widely. Our findings suggest that as a metaphor from the source domain of reparation, it appears to be a ‘one-shot’ metaphor. However, in terms of semantic groupings, it could perhaps be viewed as a metaphor of business and management.