In mid-July, it was my pleasure to represent CASS at the SSSR conference in Novia Scotia, Canada! Over 400 professionals attended, including language and literacy researchers, school teachers, and speech and language therapists.
My primary aim was to demonstrate how our CASS language development project is using corpus search methods to identify the effectiveness of teacher strategies that are being used in guided reading classroom interactions (also see part 1 & part 2 of my project introduction blogs). The best opportunity for this was during my poster presentation, which highlighted our first round of findings on the types of questions that teachers ask children.
We first demonstrated that teachers are paying attention to recommended guidelines to ask a lot of wh-questions (why, how, what, when etc): wh-questions typically take up around 20% of the total questions being asked in normal adult conversation, but took up 40% of the total questions asked by teachers in our spoken classroom interactions.
Second, the poster presents initial findings on our developmental question of whether teachers of older children ask more challenging question types than teachers of younger children. However, our chosen categories of question type (thus far) were used equivalently across year groups, so this prompts a follow up to examine whether finer categories of question type differ in their proportion of usage across year groups.
Third, the poster reported that teachers at schools in low socio-economic-status (SES) regions asked a higher proportion of wh-questions than teachers at schools in high SES regions. Most viewers of the poster agreed that this prompts us to look at children’s responses: the high proportion of wh-questions asked by teachers at schools in low SES regions might be shaped by less engaged answers from low SES children that require more follow up wh-questions relative to the typically more engaged answers provided by high SES children.
Although there were a number of other posters throughout the week that examined classroom interactions, none had taken advantage of the precise, fast and reliable search methods that we are using. Therefore, attendees were very impressed by how we have been able to interrogate our large corpus without being restricted by the amount of manual hand coding that can be achieved within a realistic time window.
Finally, a big thanks to CASS and SSSR for making this visit possible. As well as the incredible learning opportunities provided by the wide range of high quality presentations on reading research, I also had a good time meeting the fun and interesting conference attendees – and local Canadians too! Novia Scotia is a beautiful place to visit, with a very friendly and youthful demographic.
Liam will be presenting a talk on this project at the Corpus Linguistics 2017 conference on Wednesday 26th July at 4pm in Lecture Theatre 117, Physics Building, University of Birmingham. For updates, watch this space and twitter @CorpusSocialSci @LiamBlything