A school text book analysis

Weir, G.R.S. and Doherty, G. (2006) A school text book analysis. In: ICT in the Analysis, Teaching and Learning of Languages, Preprints of the ICTATLL Workshop 2006, 2006-08-21 - 2006-08-22.

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Abstract

This paper reports on a project to digitise and analyse sample reading books recently used within British Primary schools. Through analysis of the textual content of example texts from this corpus, we aimed to illustrate statistical characteristics of these texts and consider implications for the expected rate of progression across texts intended for different school levels. Our project also includes the design and implementation of software tools for assisting with this undertaking. Our approach to textual analysis relies heavily on frequency lists for each of the school text books and their comparison with frequency lists of common usage (words per million) derived from the British National Corpus. Our software toolset eases the task of contrastive analysis as well as providing helpful graphical display of analysis data.