The Linguistic Challenge of the Transition to Secondary School: A Corpus Study of Academic Language by Alice Deignan, Duygu Candarli, and Florence Oxley

Academic language differs from ordinary or everyday language in that it is used in academic contexts to help students construct knowledge within specific academic disciplines. It is characterized by discipline-specific vocabulary and syntactic patterns. Consequently, achieving proficiency in academic language across various educational levels is pedagogically beneficial for students. However, it presents a significant epistemological challenge, sparking a range of research interests. For instance, Nasseri (2021) explores the syntactic complexity inherent in academic writing, while Afzaal et al. (2021) investigate the subtle aspects of meta-discourse in these contexts. Against this backdrop, the recent book entitled ‘The Linguistic Challenge of Transition to Secondary School: A Corpus Study of Academic Language’ by Deignan et al. (2022), marks a significant advancement in several dimensions.

This volume diverges from previous empirical studies that predominantly concentrate on the psychological, emotional, and social aspects of the decline in academic achievement during the early years of secondary education (p. 6). Instead, it examines the linguistic challenges encountered by secondary school students. This not only broadens our understanding of academic language but also underscores the complex nature of linguistic adaptation during critical educational transitions from Key Stage 2 (KS2) to Key Stage 3 (KS3). A 2.5-million-word corpus of written and spoken English was constructed, enabling the application of multiple corpus techniques. These techniques were used to capture and examine linguistic changes in subjects like English, science, and mathematics, as well as in various sub-registers, such as worksheets, presentations, textbooks, and assessments.

This volume comprises eight chapters. In Chapter One, Deignan begins by outlining the significance and background of the work in supporting secondary school students. She further presents a comprehensive survey of existing studies that explore potential factors contributing to the ‘drop in attainment’ (p. 8) experienced by students during their transition from KS2 to KS3. While prior research has predominantly focused on social, psychological, and emotional issues arising from this transition, academic issues have been largely overlooked and inadequately described, with “little specific description” (p. 8). Deignan argues that academic language can also present significant hurdles for students, as exemplified by their struggles with ambiguous words, fancy words, or technical words.

The challenges in academic language attract researchers to identify the underlying issues, who contribute varying perspectives concerning language and its functions in schools. Deignan summarizes these debates and discusses the features of school language in Chapter two. In particular, she provides an overview of several perspectives on the differences between ordinary words and academic vocabularies, including restricted and elaborated codes, Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, and Beck et al.’s word tiers. The author’s theoretical approach to the issue stems from systemic functional linguistics, specifically, the register analysis, which examines “the connection between text situation, function, and linguistic characteristics” (p. 34). After reviewing earlier research on register variations in school languages and the contrast between colloquial language and school language, Deignan concludes that an in-depth large-scale corpus-assisted analysis is necessary to fully investigate changes in school language.

A solid corpus-assisted analysis relies on corpus design and methods, where representativeness and balance are crucial to the validity of the study. In Chapter three, Candarli presents a detailed description on the characteristics of the sampled partner schools, the data gathering and annotation process, and the composition of the resulting written corpus and spoken corpus. Specifically, “student timetable” are used as a reference in data gathering to achieve better balance. The corpus composition has been disaggregated to stages (KS2/KS3) and then further to sub-registers for written corpus. To analyze the well-constructed corpora, six corpus techniques for the combined quantitative and qualitative analysis are elaborated on, including multi-dimensional (MD) analysis, concordance lines, wordlists, keyness analysis, syntactic patterns, and collocation profiles.

As MD analysis is “very productive… for creating a more complete picture of the school language” (Reppen, p. 199, in Candarli, p. 76), Candarli picks up on this thread in Chapter 4. In order to ensure a robust analysis of the functional variation in the written registers of English, mathematics and science and their sub-registers at the transition stage, Candarli employs several statistical measures, including “linear mixed-effects models” (p. 79), “normalized frequencies,” and “correlations” (p. 80). The findings across Dimension 1 to Dimension 5 reveal the nuanced subject-specific and sub-register-specific changes amid the overall “informational, non-narrative, explicit, non-persuasive and non-impersonal” school language (p. 96). For instance, the increasing informational density in science and the more explicit discourse in the assessment sub-registers of English. Methodologically, the findings highlight the significance of the bottom-up categorization and situational analysis of sub-registers for more fine-tuned understandings of the linguistic and functional variation within the school language registers (p. 99).

After demonstrating the efficacy of MD analysis in detecting nuanced changes, the authors apply MD analysis and other corpus techniques in their separate exploration of language variation in English, science and mathematics during the transition, as expounded in the ensuing three chapters. Each chapter first presents the curricula goals of the subject under investigation for readers to reflect on the nature of that subject, and then observes the linguistic changes with corpus techniques. When exploring the variation in English in Chapter five, rigorous measures, including a tailored reference corpus based on BNC2014 Baby+, Cohen’s d, DP_norm, and even manual removal of words with general meaning and functions, are utilized to improve the validity of quantitative findings on the written and spoken data merged as a single corpus. Widespread shift in meaning thus revealed are triangulated with qualitative interpretation of concordance lines, suggesting “that major issues for students are likely to be increased nuance, subtlety and precision of words” (p. 134). The challenges of KS3 science are untangled with an in-depth investigation of polysemy based on corpus data, a practice that has been rarely performed previously. Through the comparison of the concordances of the top topic-specific content words in the science corpus with those in the reference corpus, the authors identify five types of meaning differences in polysemy, including “contextual differences, fine-grained differences in use, meaning differences, lexico-grammatical differences and frequency differences” (p. 155). Their insightful findings contest the prior assumption that the challenges faced by school students in science arise solely from encountering words with literal meanings that have acquired metaphorical meanings. As mathematics registers most pronounced negative effects of the transition (O’Meara et al., p. 497, in Candarli & Oxley, p. 171), its changes are addressed with a relatively new corpus technique called key feature analysis (Biber & Egbert, 2018), in conjunction with the conventional keyword, concordance and collocational analysis. Additionally, bar charts and collocational networks are utilized to depict key grammatical features and identify discourse differences, respectively. Consequently, variations in lexico-grammatical, multi-semiotic, semantic, and discourse levels are revealed, implying “a leap from KS2 to KS3 mathematics at multiple levels” (p. 196).

The concluding chapter presents a synopsis of the major discoveries and their implications. Additionally, it restates the authors’ systematic and innovative use of diverse corpus linguistic approaches, shedding light on the subtle and specific challenges of academic language across and within the three core academic subjects during the transition.

On the whole, this volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic challenges encountered by students transitioning from KS2 to KS3. Methodologically, it offers a thorough guide to utilizing diverse corpus techniques for identifying nuanced variation in subject-based language registers. The rigorous corpus design and statistical measures also enhance the reliability and validity of the findings on this underexplored topic. Nevertheless, the book has limitations. As stated in the final Chapter, the study’s geographical boundary is confined to England, and comparable investigations from other countries are needed to obtain a more holistic understanding of the linguistic challenges in the transition. Furthermore, certain techniques commonly used in university-level academic language exploration, such as lexical bundles, discourse markers and syntactic complexity, are not employed. There is also some room for enhanced data visualization. For instance, word clustering generated with VOSviewer^[1] can offer a vivid portrayal of registral variation.

In conclusion, this volume offers valuable insights into the academic language features and the linguistic obstacles encountered by school students during the transition from KS2 to KS3. The authors’ expertise in corpus techniques, statistics, and academic language allows readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Furthermore, the abundant examples and rigorous statistical analysis in the book make it a valuable reference for researchers in corpus-assisted applied linguistic studies and encourage the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Given its robust methodological foundation, this volume will be useful reference work to scholars in their investigations of academic language variations and the associated challenges.