APU Writing and Reading Corpus 1979–1988 (APU Corpus)
The APU Writing and Reading Corpus 1979–1988 (APU Corpus for short) is a diachronic corpus of British English schoolchildren’s data at Year 6-level (primary school). The materials are based on a sample of the Language Performance Surveys carried out from 1979 to 1988 by the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU), UK National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). More specifically, the APU Corpus is made up of two components: “School Scripts” from the Writing Surveys and “Basal Readers” from the Reading Surveys.
The compilation of the APU Corpus is an integral part of a larger project on literacy entitled ‘The art of writing English’: A corpus of schoolchildren’s writings, funded by the Xunta de Galicia, Proxectos Emerxentes (Grant EM2014/028). In this project we explore UK schoolchildren’s literacy performance during the pre-National Curriculum era by advocating the application of Corpus Linguistics in the field of Educational Linguistics.
Project leaders: Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (University of Vigo), Victorina González-Díaz (University of Liverpool)
Time of compilation: 2014–2016
Number of texts/samples: 522 school scripts written by children (ca. 93,000 words); 21 basal readers written for children (ca. 79,000 words)
Period: 1979, 1988
Type of corpus: multi-genre (narrative-cum-descriptive; argumentative-cum-persuasive)
Released: to be released in 2017
Funding: Xunta de Galicia, Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria. Proxectos Emerxentes, Grant EM2014/028 (2014–2016)
Contact email: email@example.com
Corpus access: https://apucorpus.liverpool.ac.uk
Project home page: http://apucorpus.webs.uvigo.es
Reference line and copyright
APU Writing and Reading Corpus 1979–1988. Compiled by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (University of Vigo, Spain) and Victorina González-Díaz (University of Liverpool, UK). Copyright rests with ©The University of Liverpool 2015 and based on the rights passed to us by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER).
The APU transcriptions shall only be used for non-profit teaching and research. Extracts may be quoted under normal conditions of fair use and must acknowledge the source. The material drawn from the APU corpus, whether printed, in electronic, or any other form, is intended for the said registered user only and may not be distributed, or transferred to a third party.
School Scripts: Copyright rests with ©The University of Liverpool 2015 and based on the rights passed to us by NFER. The project members agree to observe the original privacy undertakings given to the participating children's parents and schools by ensuring that no child who participated in the surveys can be identified in any publication arising from the digitalisation of or research based on the materials, and agrees further to obtain equivalent written undertakings from any colleague involved in those processes. Ensuring that no child can be identified implies, as appropriate, anonymising quotations, blanking out written names or bleeping out spoken names.
Basal Readers: Copyright rests with ©The University of Liverpool 2015 and based on the rights passed to us by NFER. Reproduction of the images from the original supplementary materials has been kindly granted by the publishers, 2016.
Available via the online interface.
Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (University of Vigo)
Victorina González-Díaz (University of Liverpool)
Yolanda Fernández-Pena (University of Vigo)
Dolores González-Álvarez (University of Vigo)
Sofía Bemposta-Rivas, Carla Bouzada-Jabois, Evelyn Gandón-Chapela, Carla Seabra-Dacosta (University of Vigo); Roanne M. Ephithite (University of Liverpool/The Reader Organisation)
Computing Services Department, University of Liverpool; Denys Bondarenko, Prof. David Denison
XML (TEI-lite), part of speech (CLAWS7), semantic (USAS).
Free subscription. Soon to be released.
This project has been generously funded by Xunta de Galicia, Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria. Proxectos Emerxentes, Grant EM2014/028 (2014-2016).
Our gratitude extends to the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and, in particular, its former Deputy Director, Dr Chris Whetton, for agreeing to the use of the APU materials for teaching research purposes. We are also indebted to Dr Greg Brooks, Prof. Bas Aarts, Prof. Dick Hudson, Prof. David Denison, and Dr Anne Qualter for their suggestions, help and advice at different stages of the corpus compilation.
The APU materials have been safeguarded at the University of Liverpool (UK) since 1991. They have been supervised by Dr Victorina González-Díaz at the said university since 2007.
CoRD Entry submitted on September 26, 2016 by Dr Nuria Yáñez-Bouza.