Introduction Draft 1

Introduction

   For my English Language investigation, I will be looking at Children’s Language Acquisition, in particular, the developing language complexity of children’s books. My secondary research will be obtained through search engines and information on reading schemes. Experience has shown that language becomes increasingly difficult as children progress through the reading schemes; therefore I will compare how language complexity occurs. I believe that I will find significant variety between the sentence and overall book length, grammar, vocabulary used and consonant clusters.

Hypothesis

   I hypothesise that as children progress through the reading scheme books, there will be a gradual increase in the complexity of the following features:

·         Sentence length (as children become more familiar with simple conjunctions)

·         Overall book length (when their attention span increases)

·         Grammar (more complex, concrete nouns, adjectives and verb tenses)

·         Vocabulary (wider range of words used to broaden a child’s vocabulary)

·         Repetition of words (children need between 4 – 14 exposures to recognise a word)

·         Consonant clusters (more difficult to develop the letter-sound relationship)

Methodology

   In order to obtain this data I shall contact a local infant school and ask to borrow a variety of Oxford Reading Tree scheme books for a short time. Once I have the books I will photocopy each book so I will have a hard copy to annotate and use. Furthermore, I will scan these paper copies onto my computer so I will be able to access, annotate and copy sections of text to use in my investigation.

   There are no ethical issues with gathering this data as it is part of a public domain and therefore already accessible to a wider audience. The books I have chosen will be a representative sample owing to them being a part of a nationwide reading scheme.

   For my secondary research, I will predominantly use search engines to research about how reading schemes help children to read and any theorists who have looked into the development of complexity within different books in a children’s reading scheme books. I shall also access scholarly articles and books focusing on how language in children’s books becomes more complex as they learn to read. I will need this information to understand how reading schemes work and to understand why the progressions occur in that particular order, such as the length of sentences increasing before vocabulary. Once I have this secondary data, I will ensure that I have a sample of data from a variety of mediums and that I only include relevant details in my actual investigation. I plan to use the “method” structure for analysing my data, for example, I will analyse the sentence length each book before moving on to grammar.