Abstract
With the rapid increase in the number of available digital texts in schools, new methodological approaches to studying writing development in education are now emerging. However, with new methodological approaches follow new epistemological challenges. In this article, I examine some of these challenges and discuss how they affect the role of computational linguistics within the field of educational writing research. The article is structured around three main sections. First, I position computational linguistics within the wider field of educational writing research with particular focus on L1 writing and K12 education. Second, I discuss to what extent methods from computational linguistics can provide us with new insights into different aspects of educational writing. Third, I discuss the potential of the concept of affordance to bridge between technology-centered and human-centered methodological approaches, and I relate this idea to recent theoretical developments in the digital humanities. Based on this discussion, I conclude the article with suggestions for possible directions in future writing research.
Highlights
Computational linguistics (CL) is by no means a new research field
Concluding remarks This article has offered an explorative discussion of the role and potential of CL methods in educational writing research
This is a discussion that is particular for writing research, in the sense that it concerns matters such as linguistic representation, writing development and pragmatics
Summary
Computational linguistics (CL) is by no means a new research field. It traces back to the very early days of computing in the 1940s, and it has since had great impact within fields such as machine translation and artificial intelligence (Hirst, 2013). As pointed out by Carter (2007), the textual act of writing in education expresses different kinds of knowing and doing within the disciplines, because the primary purpose of writing within a discipline is learning, and the successful realization of such a purpose is related to - but not directly equivalent to - a generic notion of writing competence or text quality.
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