Making school writing visible and legible. Transcribing and annotating a corpus of text

This article presents the theoretical and methodological foundations of the E-CALM corpus. This corpus was built in response to the need to document the writing skills of students in France at different levels of schooling. E-CALM is a reservoir of textual data that can be used for research and teacher training. The choices made in the processing of the manuscripts collected have made it possible to bring out the traces of pupils' writing and their interactions with the teachers who corrected and commented on the copies. The study of a large corpus of school writing with the help of IT tools allows us to confirm what we already know, but also to bring to light new elements that are invisible when observing small amounts of data, but which can be revealed by a large corpus such as E-CALM (over one million words). Once produced, the linguistic analysis leads to didactic advances: by bringing out discriminative elements in the texts, correlated with didactic and sociological variables, it makes it possible to propose teaching protocols tailored to the learning context.