Mid Sweden University

This article describes a collaborative project involving the construction of a corpus of graded year 9 National Tests in written English. National Tests are standardized high stakes tests which are an important part of the Swedish education system because the results provide an indication of performance at national level, and also feed into pupils’ overall assessment. The grading of National Tests in written English has been found to be problematic for teachers, and a need for assessment training identified (Erickson and Tholin 2022). By providing a searchable database of graded written texts, together with the teacher feedback, this project aims to create a resource to support pre- and in-service teachers in interpreting knowledge requirements and assessment guidelines, and providing effective feedback. The corpus will also provide a resource for research into the features of student writing at different grade levels. To create the corpus, past papers from collaborating schools have been anonymized, digitized and coded. As a result, pupils’ texts can be easily sorted by a range of criteria, for example, year, gender, education type, grade achieved on the written paper and overall grade for the National Test. Teacher feedback can be accessed similarly. We outline potential research areas provided by this resource, and demonstrate how some of these might be explored. We also give examples of how the developing corpus has already been used as a resource for English teacher training programmes, and outline future plans for the project.

Uriah Burton’s collaborative life story is a rare text, and no research has been carried out on it. Burton makes several important interventions in the politics of space and place in the UK, as he fights, sometimes literally, for peace, rest, and safe living places. He is a self-proclaimed group leader, group representative, and peacemaker, and he fights for authority and influence to achieve his goals. The in-between positions that he adopts intersect with historically inculcated discourses of sedentarism, control, surveillance, and assimilation, and his efforts led to significant interventions concerning private caravan site provision for Romanies, Gypsies, Travellers, and people of no fixed abode. He is religious and fights for justified aims—a just war, which reverberates in his nickname “Big Just”. However, he does have to negotiate and compromise to achieve his aims, as well as endure attacks on his personality, his representative status, and his ideas of right and wrong. 

This poster presents an ongoing project at Mid-Sweden University which aims to develop asearchable digital database of complete past papers of the Swedish National Test in English.Swedish school students are required to take National Tests in English, similar to StandardisedAchievement Tests (SATS), in years 6 and 9. These assess students’ productive and receptiveskills in written and spoken English through a range of tasks: an oral test carried out in pairs,listening and reading comprehensions with a range of texts and tasks, and a writing test.Assessment is carried out at individual school level, with national guidance provided, includingtest specifications, commented answers and authentic samples of benchmarked oral and writtenperformance, cut-off scores etc. (Erikson 2020).

Visual and / or textual representations of Romanies / Gypsies in the UK have a tendency toposition or trap what they represent at one side or the other of a romantic / derogatory dichotomy. However, even these supposedly static representations have changed over time andin relation to geographical location, and historical and socio-political discourse. In recent times, the derogatory side of the dichotomy has become increasingly dominant, while romanticised representations have become literally relegated to the past, or, more accurately, an imagined past. In this paper, I will argue that these romanticised representations are not really about the past, but about the present of the prospective consumer / reader. This can be seen in the marketing of Romani / Gypsy life stories. In this presentation, I will analyse the paratextual construction of two Romani / Gypsy life stories and argue that their respective constructions are partly directed towards consumers whose lives are negatively affected by contemporary socio-economic and social instabilities – a form of escapism caused by the pressures of everyday life. The analysis will also argue that the paratextual construction is an expression of imperial nostalgia (Boym), which infers a yearning for what has been destroyed – a contemporary expression of the perceived success of a civilizing process.

The title of Romani Uriah Burton’s 26-page collaborative life story includes the words “aims” and “ideals,” and these two words capture significant parts of the contents of the life story. Aims include building a caravan park for his fellow Gypsies and Travellers to live on, walking from Belfast to Dublin in “Peace People” style, constructing a monument to his father on top of a Welsh hilltop, and negotiating punishments in terms of “Gypsy Law”. Some of these aims were ideals to begin with, but he made them real, while other ideas remained ideals, but not for the want of trying. The following words can be seen directly after the title on the inner flap of the life story: “WITH GREETINGS TO ALL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD,” and these few words also capture parts of the life story. Burton took personal action to bring attention to the much-needed idea of peace in a troubled Ireland, but he also wanted world peace. One aspect of Burton’s identity seems to contradict this description – he was a renowned no-rules, bare-knuckle fighter with a fierce reputation, but he depicts himself as maintaining the idea that he used his many abilities, including his fighting ability, to preserve and maintain different forms of peace. His lifestory is quite rare, as there were only a few hundred copies published; it has circulated within Gypsy circles, and, he writes: “Four copies of this article have been issued to every country in the world” (p. 23). The life story is referred to as a booklet and an article, and the 1st of January, 1980, is suggested as the “day of the declaration of peace”: that is, the declaration of the desire for world peace. Burton claims that he has difficulty making himself understood and understanding modern society (p.1), but maybe it is time that he was understood; my presentation will consist of an attempt to do so.

Paul Torday’s satiric epistolary novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, includes (un)intended critiques of globalization, as Peter Maxwell, Director of Communications Prime Minister’s Office, conjoins diffusionism, westernization and market liberalization with vertical coercion and pacification strategies to realize his political aims with the Yemen Salmon Project. Maxwell’s imperialist vision is posited against a Yemeni Sheik’s vision of the project’s hierarchy-leveling and peace-bringing effects on Yemen and then the globe. The project has negative consequences for environmental work, many of the human characters and the outsourced salmon. Nature ends the project and signals the end of both human-human and human-non-human imperialisms.

Gordon Silvester Boswell’s collaborative life story, The Book of Boswell: The Autobiography ofa Gypsy (1970) was the first Romani/Gypsy life story to be published by a mainstream publisher(Gollancz) in the UK. It is a deceivably complex autoethnographic text, but this complexity ismade even more ambivalent when the role and significance of the “interviewer,” transcriber andeditor, John Seymour, is taken into consideration. I will suggest that Boswell’s re-tellings of thepast in the present were affected by the collaboration between Boswell and Seymour – a writerof books on self-sufficiency. The resultant life story text (a conflation of voices) brought into focusa rhetoric of nature that glides towards close-to-nature romanticism. The life story was alsorepublished in 1973 by Penguin Books and then by Faber and Faber (Faber Finds) in 2012. Theparatexts (blurbs) on the two later editions seem not only to strengthen the close-to-naturethreshold projections of the life story content, but position John Seymour and his continuinginterest in self-sufficiency in a more prominent position as a sales strategy. This marketingtendency towards nature discourse has also had consequences concerning the thresholdrepresentations of other Romani/Gypsy and Traveller life stories.