[ Origins | Prototype | Present Corpus | Further Developments ]
This corpus was developed in response to teaching initiatives pioneered by Wilma Shaw, Jean Simpson and Anne Randell. These three teachers set their classes the task of researching a topic of their own choice - for example, a favourite hobby or animal - and writing a 'project' on it, in order to encourage children to develop independent study skills. This type of project work was set as a task for the 'Top Juniors' class (10 - 11 year old children, now called 'Year 6') from the late 1980s. Anne Randell, the teacher of this class, saw it as a good opportunity to allow the children to work according to their capabilities, which by this age were extremely diverse. In the early 1990's Jean Simpson extended this pedagogic practice to Year 5, and, in November 1994, Wilma Shaw first experimented with undertaking project work of this sort with Year 4.
The research programme of which this corpus is a part began as a small pilot study funded by the Lancaster University Faculty of Social Sciences Research Initiatives Fund in 1994, observing and documenting Wilma Shaw's experiment with the Year 4 class of 37 children. The research team was interested in the children's literacy practices and products associated with this type of work. Most of the children's Year 4 project work was collected and/or photocopied, and we hope at a later date to incorporate this material into the corpus.
In the summer of 1995 hypertext was becoming a well-established and widely used technology. The principal researcher, Roz Ivanic, envisaged the possibility of keeping visual records of the pages of the children's work in the form of digital scans which could be accessed using standard web-browsing software, with links to the text of the children's 'writing' and possibly to other forms of data. Ruthanna Barnett developed a prototype hyperdocument for displaying and accessing one child's Year 4 project on the topic of 'Computers'. She thus pioneered the techniques for building a hyperlinked multi-media corpus of this sort.
Encouraged by Ruthanna Barnett's success in constructing this prototype, Roz Ivanic and Tony McEnery applied for funding to develop this work further and build a multi-media hypertext-based corpus consisting of a large quantity of the same children's project work in Years 5 and 6. The main work was done during the period 1996 - 1998, with refinement, further development and expansion 1998 - 2000.
This corpus has now become one element in a larger research programme, concerned with tracking the same group of children over five years in order to study development of their "writing-for-learning" practices over time. The current phase of the project is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, under Award No. R000 22 2856). It focusses on the children's transition from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3, based on interviews with a subset of 12 children. For more information about this phase of the research, please contact Roz Ivanic, r.ivanic@lancaster.ac.uk.