Our kids changing English
For more information, to register, or donate visit heartkids.org.au/ whats-on THE words Victorian children write are changing, with “computer”, “versus” and “guys” no longer in popular use by five to seven-year-olds.
A study comparing the words written by boys and girls between 2007 and 2017 shows children’s writing is getting more informal, with “mum” replacing “mother”, “hi” replacing “hello” and “vs.” replacing “versus”.
The Flinders University study of 3218 writing samples from 1000 boys and girls also shows prep or foundation children are writing less words on average.
The Oxford Wordlist study, led by education researcher Anne Bayetto, also finds children are increasingly using colourful adjectives such as “super”, “awesome”, “amazing” and “crazy”.
A gender divide is also ap- parent in the writing of the South Australian and Victorian five to seven-year-olds.
Girls were more likely to use words such as “princess”, “girl”, “castle”, “rainbow”, “unicorn” and “grandma”, while boys wrote more about sport and adventure, with “ninja”, “soccer” and “football” com- monly used. “The intention has been to record and analyse words that students spontaneously chose to write and to consider whether there were shared indicators and trends in relation to how students perceive their identities and lived experiences,” Mrs Bayetto said.