Writing Tasks at School and University

Writing Tasks at School and University is a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and led by Professor Phil Durrant, with researchers at the University of Exeter and Montclair State University.  

The research seeks to understand the use and development of academic language in writing tasks across different subject areas and educational levels in schools and universities. 

The project aims to:

1. create a ‘map’ of the range of writing tasks at schools and universities. This will enable researchers and educators to understand: 

• a. the linguistic challenges and learning opportunities presented by different types of writing task in different disciplines; 

• b. the linguistic similarities and differences between the writing needed for different tasks and disciplines, and the principles underlying this variation; 

• c. the typical distribution of text types across educational levels and disciplines;

2. create and evaluate an online resource and practitioner-focused guidance that will help users navigate this map in order to: 

• a. gain an explicit, detailed, understanding of variation in academic language and; 

• b. understand how individual tasks, and the texts students produce, fit into their broader educational experiences and needs; 

3. support future research by creating new reference resources. We will add grammatical annotations and information about text type variation to two existing corpora of school and university level writing. Our survey will, further, provide a basis for evaluating the representativeness of these and future collections of academic writing.