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Dr Bram Vandekerckhove, a post-doc working with Professor Kate Nation in the Language and Cognitive Development Research group, was interviewed live by Chris Evans on his BBC Radio 2 Breakfast show, discussing what this year’s 500 Words children’s writing competition can tell us about children’s language and literacy development.  He described how taking a computational approach allows us to analyse many millions of words written by children and how we can use these data to inform our understanding about how experience shapes children’s learning. You can listen to his interview here, starting at about 1.12.
This work is in collaboration with OUP Children’s Dictionaries Department.  Bram was seconded to OUP for 2 months to work on this year’s competition entries.  Read more about this year’s findings and OUP’s work here, including children’s creative use of the word of the year, #hashtag!