CORPUS OF NATIVE-SPEAKER YOUTH ENGLISH

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The Corpus of Native-Speaker Youth English doesn't exist yet. It is being created through the Share Your Writing website into which British children and teenagers paste their writing. 

CONYE was originally an initiative of the British Council China, the aim being to provide linguistic data to the authors of ELT teaching resources. TransformELT won the grant. 

Once we have enough data, we will derive a wide range of lists. The corpus will also be publicly available through VersaCorp, here on the Versatile website.​

The corpus will contain  written and spoken language that young British people read and write, hear and say. It is therefore a corpus representing receptive and productive skills. The target age range is 9 to 16.

​The corpus needs a lot of data: 1,000 children submitting 1,000 words each is only a million words. This is a very small corpus by today' standards.  

How to participate
Schools and organisations contact Jennifer Law: jenniferlaw567@gmail.com.I

What it means to various stakeholders

​Association / Institution / LA

1. Enable your members / education teams to compare learners’ subject specific language use within a target region and across other parts of the UK.
2. Contribute to your strategic educational aims e.g., improving communication and language skills and improved outcomes at GCSE level.   
3. Acknowledgement of contribution from members / schools within your catchment area in the research literature.

School

1. Support a sharp focus on vocabulary development and language use across subjects and grades.
2. Demonstrate to Ofsted commitment to communication and language development.

Teacher

1. Facilitate setting up computer-based analytical language tasks to encourage critical thinking and develop learners’ metacognition.
2. Provide useful information that relates to ‘readability’ of texts.
3. Enable comparison between student outputs across specific counties and countrywide.

 Learner

1. Provide a fun way to analyse their own spoken and written language use. 
2. Create a healthy competitive challenge by awarding recognition of their contributions.

The lead researcher on this project is James Thomas, who is currently the Director of MA TESL at Webster University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.​

​Vit Baisa  who was largely responsible for programming SkELL and VersaText, is developing tools for data collection and will program VersaCorp. ​

Jennifer Law is liaising with the British schools  and many other organisations, which we hope will supply texts for the corpus. ​

The RIA grant was won by TransformELT in December 2021, and the project is managed by Alan Pulverness, one of the Norwich-based company's three directors.

​Our Chinese partners are  Professor Yafu Gong and Professor Li, and at the British Council in Beijing, Fraser Bewick. ​