The linguistic challenges of the transition from primary to secondary school

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.

The primary beneficiaries of the project are school students. The project will produce knowledge that can be used to support students moving from primary to secondary school, and in the first two years of secondary school. Their ability to understand academic school language, and hence to access the curriculum, will be improved if the education professionals who teach and support them, and those who design their curricula and assessments, have an accurate, comprehensive and systematic understanding of the linguistic challenges that the students face. This middle stage of education is a critical point for students' engagement and motivation, and performance at this point is a strong predictor for GCSE achievement and beyond; it follows that improvements gained at this point will also provide a longer term benefit.

The project will therefore have important implications for people who work with these students, or whose work impacts on them. The main groups are:
A. In schools:
1 Teachers in primary schools preparing students for the transition in Years 5 and 6. The project findings will inform a focussed linguistic academic preparation for Key Stage 3, alongside the work that already takes place around social and practical aspects of the move.
2 Teachers, heads of department and other leadership staff in secondary schools; the project findings can inform subject teaching, teaching support and literacy materials for students in Years 7 and 8. At the school management level, project findings will inform ongoing assessment and support.
3 Senior school students who have a mentoring role for younger students;
4 Learning and literacy support staff in schools;

B At the level of policy and curriculum:
5 Curriculum designers; the project findings can contribute to the design of year and key stage language targets, and curricula;
6 Assessment designers, especially for Key Stages 2 and 3;
7 Writers of materials that prepare students for assessment, and that support study skills and language.

These groups have and will continue to contribute to the project throughout its lifetime in various ways, including the following:
Users from both groups above will be represented on the project advisory board, which will input into all aspects of the research and impact programme.
Teachers and materials writers have been involved at the design stage advising on issues such as data collection, design of dataset, timing, outputs.
Interviews with students and teachers will inform the composition and analysis of the datasets. The interviews will also help orient the outputs to users effectively.
Through school-based workshops, teachers, teaching assistants, sixth form students and other school personnel will be involved in discussions of the progress of the project, data analysis and development of outputs.
Through work experience weeks, to be held each year at the University of Leeds, sixth form students (Year 12) will be involved in data analysis and other aspects of the project.

The project findings will be communicated to these groups through a number of mechanisms detailed in the Pathways to Impact statement. These include:
Events in London, Birmingham and Leeds, to disseminate and discuss project findings with users at the level of policy and curriculum, and with school users.
Use of a range of print and electronic outlets throughout and beyond the project to publicise the research and findings to identified users from both groups.