Writing at School and University: Corpus, Linguistic Analysis and Writing Pedagogy – E-CALM

Students’ relationship to writing is a key determinant of school and university achievement and social integration in France. For this reason, writing still remains to be explored from the perspective of the writers’ actual skills, the linguistic aspects of their production and the contextual factors that constrain the production. In addition, the way in which teachers evaluate writing remains unclear, particularly the relationship between their comments on copies and the students’ correction/rewriting of their texts. What language skills do school and university students demonstrate in their texts and drafts according to their age and socio-cultural milieu? What role do the teachers’ practices play in influencing these manifestations? How can teachers be equipped in terms of their interventions on copies of their students? These are the questions that this pluridisciplinary research project sets out to answer through a collaboration between experts in the sociology of education and language, corpus linguistics, digital textual analysis and the didactics of writing. Based on a corpus of school and university students’ writing made available during the project, researchers will focus on characterizing certain scriptural skills (spelling and textual coherence) and better understanding of how teachers, through their interventions on copies, guide the writing of their students, in order to support them in the process of revision at school and university.

This multidisciplinary project brings together the expertise of four laboratories:
• Three teams in Language Sciences that combine an expertise in the analysis of learners’ writing and in natural language processing:
o Clesthia (EA 7345) has developed the Ecriscol (school students’ writing) corpus. Researchers involved in the E-CALM project are experts in the genetic analysis of school students’ writing, macro- and micro-discourse structures and digital textual analysis.
o CLLE-ERSS (UMR 5263) has developed the Resolco corpus (school writing involving the discursive competence of the writers). The researchers involved in are specialists in discourse analysis and in the didactics of French as a mother tongue, using a tool-based linguistic approach.
o Lidilem (EA 609) has developed the Littéracie avancée (university students’ writing) and the Scoledit (writing acquisition) corpora. Researchers involved in E-CALM are experts in linguistics, in the didactics of writing and in natural language processing.

• A host team in Educational Sciences (CIRCEFT-ESCOL, EA 4384) consisting of sociologists of education and language who study students’ relationship to knowledge and, in particular, the language of students from contrasted social backgrounds.
The current work has three objectives:
- Structuring and making available to the scientific community a vast corpus of school and university students’ writings.
- Characterizing these writings and the expectations of the teachers from the point of view of the acquisition of spelling and coherence though socially-contextualized analyses.
- Studying the modalities of writing in the pre-texts (plans, notes, drafts) and texts, in particular through the reciprocal influence of the written texts and the teachers’ interventions on the copies.
Achieving these common goals will require a large amount of linguistic and technological work, leading to the following deliverables:
- The availability of the corpus and all its enrichments.
- The creation of investigation modules adapted to the corpus and its related queries.
- An annotation method adapted to the specificities of the students’ writings, together with good practice guides for the collection and processing of the data.
- The description of scriptural skills (morphography and coherence / cohesion) by grade level in relation to contextual variables.
- Recommendations concerning the professional practice of copy correction.