The Agenda of The Reading Teacher Journal (RT) on reading skills: A Decade within a Corpus

Abstract

The science of reading aims to explain the process of teaching and learning reading to educators, families, and students to enhance children's success in school and social life. Research in education, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience has provided insights into the cognitive processes of reading and the brain's functions during reading, facilitating the development of effective teaching methods and models. This study conducts a corpus-based analysis of the last decade of research trends related to reading to determine the frequently occurring collocations, their distribution over time, and the emerging and declining concepts in the field. Corpus linguistics is a quantitative approach that relies on analyzing large volumes of language data to uncover patterns and features of language use. It involves the preparation of corpora, which are digital collections of texts, and using statistical tools to analyze the data within them. RT's publications in the last ten years were recorded according to year, volume, and number. The data was harvested via online versions of journals and the collected data were transformed into raw text. Figures, tables, graphic information, and footnotes were excluded from the data. Each text was annotated with "year", "issue", "volume", "keyword 1" and "keyword 2" tags. TreeTagger was used for part-of-speech tagging and CQPWeb/CWB framework was used as the corpus interface. The whole data formed a corpus of 3,548,008 words. This study provides a corpus-based analysis of the concepts that frequently form collocations with the word "reading" in the Reading Teacher (RT) over the last decade. The findings reveal the most frequently used concepts and their distribution according to years and the concepts that have experienced a decline or an increase in usage. The study sheds light on the language and discourse of reading education and contributes to understanding the changes and trends in the field.