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This article describes the design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus. The corpus combines several features that are all rare for learner corpora: it is longitudinal, following individual pupils over several years; it has data from young learners from school years 5 to 13 (ages 10–18); it is multilingual, containing learners’ texts in several L3s (French, German and Spanish), L2 English and L1 Norwegian; and it includes teacher comments on a number of the texts. In addition, some of the texts exist in both a first and a second revised version, all tied to a rich set of meta-data. Not only does such a corpus offer new possibilities for research on language acquisition in general; it can also be used to provide valuable insights for teachers, teacher training and policymaking within the national context of Norway. In this article, we describe the design of the TRAWL Corpus and outline its uses and benefits for the research community. We also describe the compilation process in the hope that it may inspire and enable others to build similar corpora for their own national contexts.

A pervasive finding in learner corpus research is that advanced EFL learners tend to overuse interactional features of writer/reader visibility (WRV) in their written academic texts, including first-and second-person pronouns, I think, modal adverbs, modal auxiliaries, and questions. Very little research has been done on younger learners, however. The present study is a mixed-methods investigation of WRV features in argumentative and expository genres in the TRAWL longitudinal corpus of learner texts from Norwegian lower secondary school. Comparisons are made with more advanced levels (undergraduate university students) using the Norwegian component of ICLE, ICLE-NO.The results show that the TRAWL pupils use many WRV features in their writing, firstperson reference being especially frequent (with I dominating). Compared to the advanced learners in ICLE-NO, the TRAWL learners overuse some, but not all, features. One explanation for the high frequency of WRV features in TRAWL is that the prompts -both argumentative and expository -often request a personal style. Some expository prompts and texts are more impersonal, but overall there is little distinction between the genres. The pedagogical implications are that instructors need to be more specific about genre requirements, and create more obligatory prompts that do not request a personal style.

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Studies show that intermediate and advanced learners of English overuse informal features in their academic writing, and researchers recommend that instructional material is developed to raise learners’ awareness of this overuse. In Norway, little research has been done on younger learners’ writing, and no previous study exists of how instructional material such as textbooks deal with informality. The present article investigates how all English textbooks published for lower secondary school under the current curriculum deal with informality in writing. The findings show that eight out of nine textbooks include instruction on informality. The most frequently mentioned informal features are informal opening/closing phrases and forms of address in letters, contractions, abbreviations, slang, exclamations, and expressions of modality, evaluation and subjective stance, all of which are known from previous research and/or style manuals. The textbook instructions focus on when to use these features and, more importantly, when to avoid them. Rather unexpectedly, there is little focus on the first person pronoun as an informal feature, which is notable, considering its importance in the literature. First person pronoun usage is, however, a controversial topic, and it is possible that most textbook authors have decided to leave it for later stages. It is also possible that the textbook authors do not consider it an informal feature.The survey provides a backdrop for future research on pupils’ writing by focussing on one aspect of the school context in which this writing is produced, namely the textbooks. Keywords: informal language; English L2 writing, textbook analysis Uformelt språk i engelsk skriving: Hva sier lærebøkene? SammendragForskning viser at elever på videregående skole og universitetsstudenter bruker for mange uformelle språktrekk i sin akademiske skriving, og forskere anbefaler at det utvikles læremateriell for å heve innlæreres bevissthet om dette temaet. Det er gjort lite forskning i Norge på yngre elevers skriving i engelsk, og det finnes ingen studier av hvordan læremateriell i engelsk, slik som lærebøker, behandler temaet uformelt språk. Denne artikkelen undersøker hvordan samtlige engelske lærebøker publisert for ungdomsskolen etter Kunnskapsløftet (LK06) behandler temaet uformelle språktrekk i skriving.Analysen viser at åtte av ni læreverk inkluderer noe instruksjon om uformelt språk. De uformelle trekkene som nevnes oftest er uformelle åpnings- og avslutningshilsner og uformelle tiltaleformer i brev, sammentrukne former, forkortelser, slang, utrop, og uttrykk for modalitet, evaluering og subjektive holdninger, alle vel kjente fra tidligere forskning og/eller fra språkbruksbøker. Lærebøkenes instruksjoner fokuserer på når det er passende og upassende å bruke disse trekkene i skriftlige tekster.Noe uventet er det lite fokus på førstepersonspronomenet I som et uformelt trekk, hvilket er påfallende med tanke på hvor sentralt temaet er i forskningslitteraturen. En forklaring kan være at temaet er kontroversielt, og det er mulig de fleste lærebokforfatterne mener det er for tidlig å behandle det på ungdomsskolen. Det er også mulig at lærebokforfatterne ikke anser førstepersonspronomenet for å være et uformelt trekk.Studien bidrar med kunnskap som er relevant for framtidig forskning på elevers skriving ved at den fokuserer på ett aspekt ved skolekonteksten som denne skrivingen foregår i, nemlig lærebøkene. Nøkkelord: uformelt språk, skriving i engelsk som andrespråk/fremmedspråk, lærebokanalyse