Group Interviews With School Students About the Transition From Primary School to Secondary School, 2022

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The transition project at the University of Leeds examined the change in academic language encountered by school students when they transition from primary to secondary school. The project involved focus group interviews with school students spanning 12 months. There were four interview phases: when students were midway through their final year of primary school; just before the end of primary school; early in their first year of secondary school, and midway through the first year of secondary school. Five interviews with six students in each were conducted in the first three phases, and two in the final phase (which was interrupted by school closures due to Covid-19). Students were asked for their feelings about the transition and their views on the academic and language demands of their work at each stage.

The project moves forward research in educational registers and academic language through a set of detailed and ambitious linguistic and discourse analytic studies. It will generate a substantial body of knowledge about the academic language that students need in order to access the early secondary school curriculum in England. Comparative studies will show how this differs from the academic language of primary school, and from language use in public domains outside school. It is well documented that many students find the transition from primary to secondary school difficult. In the first years of secondary school, there is often a drop in attainment and motivation in the performance of children at all ability levels, partly for social reasons, such as joining a much larger school, changes in friendship groups, etc. The new academic and linguistic demands that students face also play a very important part. Language is central in enabling or preventing access to the curriculum. We are concerned with native speakers of English rather than the specific issues faced by second language speakers; the teachers we have spoken to confirm reports from the literature that many native English-speaking students lack the language needed to access the secondary school curriculum. Most schools have remedial language provision, and there are various text and web-based language support resources. However, these do not draw on rigorous accounts of school language; as yet there has been no large-scale systematic study that can provide such accounts. This project will use innovative computational techniques from the discipline of corpus linguistics to address this gap. We have already begun working with teachers to identify what should go into collections of written and transcribed spoken texts ('corpora') that can represent the academic language encountered by students at different points in their schooling and in different subjects. The project will continue this work with teachers and students through interviews and workshops. We will collect texts with and from our partner schools, which are situated across a range of socio-economically diverse communities in the Yorkshire region and in Birmingham. These will be used to build two corpora representing the academic language experience of, firstly, late primary school, and, secondly, early secondary school. Each will consist of approximately 1,000,000 words and will be stored securely in machine-readable form. A third source of data will be components of existing corpora, selected as approximately representative of the 'public' language experience of students outside school, for example, fiction, magazines, websites and social media. The two purpose built corpora will be analysed and compared using corpus software, some of which will be developed specifically for this project. They will also be compared with the third dataset. The analysis will identify differences at the level of word, including word meaning and collocational patterns (which can signal specialised meaning and register) and grammar. Discourse patterns are less easy to analyse using corpus tools, so we will conduct manual discourse analyses on selected texts. Ongoing interviews and workshops will inform our analyses, and will help us to develop understandings of how the transition is experienced by students and seen by teachers. The project will produce a systematic description of the academic language of secondary school, and accounts of how this differs from the language of primary school and public language outside school. It will produce versions of this for different readerships, including academic readers with a specialist interest in educational registers, materials writers, and classroom teachers and teaching assistants. Teachers and school students will be involved from the early stages, as contributors to the project as well as building their own research capacity and knowledge base.