Tagging pupils’ expository writing: Hunting for emerging backgrounding as quality development

In my presentation on tagging corpus data, I shall start by establishing ‘discourse-functional’ units of analysis, the smallest units that have discourse-level (communicative) functions in coherent writing. Such units are clause-like, but not primarily dependent on syntax or punctuation (which may both be flawed in children’s writing). Such units are then assigned a discourse function (like specification, conditional premises, contrast, cause/reason, evaluation or conclusion) before the resulting tagged version is interpreted within theory of grounding (Evensen, 2013). A grounding hypothesis implies the assumption that quality development is related to establishing a background in coherent discourse that adds perspective to a focus of foregrounded elements.

My case data is from an initially mediocre female 11-year old who developed substantially during an intervention project where the social functions of writing were at the centre of attention. This case writer is included in the Norm project corpus, a database where the writing of children from elementary grades 3-4 and 6-7 was collected over a two-year period, along with metadata including schools, pupils, writing assignments and a sequence of writings during the intervention period. My data represents the pre- and post-intervention writings of the case writer.

References
EVENSEN, L. S. (2013). Applied Linguistics: Towards new integration? London: Equinox.