Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Assessing the Correlation Between Linguistic Richness Concentration and Assigned Grade Level of Secondary Ed. English Language Arts Texts

by Victoria Kate Everson

This is a preliminary study to help answer the question of whether or not North American secondary school English Language Arts (ELA) reading lists appropriately increase linguistic richness across grade level. The leading hypothesis was that there would be a positive correlation between grade level increase and linguistic richness increase when measuring for: syntax variety (SV), average sentence length (ASL), unique word diversity (UWD), and average dependency arrow length (ADAL). A corpus of 299 secondary school ELA short stories and poems was analysed computationally and statistically to first determine richness concentration and then compare concentration to grade level. The study found ASL and ADAL to be salient predictors of grade level and SV and UWD to be underrepresented in the data, despite clear student competency standards that prioritize syntax mastery. Overall, there were few, strong correlations between increasing grade level and increasing richness – pointing to a possible deficiency in how our educational bodies define, measure, and prioritize adequate literary exposure for adolescents.