Category: Sketch Engine

500 Words 2019

The world’s biggest short-story writing competition for kids has returned.

Dates for your diary

All entries must be received by Friday 8th March at 7pm.

This year’s 500 Words Final will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 2 from Windsor Castle, on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, on Friday 14th June.

A corpus of stories written by children

500 Words is an open invitation to the wide world of imagination, so it’s time to get those creative cogs turning!

BBC, Oxford University Press, 500 Words and Sketch Engine – what’s the connection? BBC and Oxford University Press organize the world’s biggest short-story writing competition for kids.

After the winners are announced, the stories are processed by Sketch Engine into the Oxford Children’s Corpus, a 340-million-word database used by linguists and lexicographers to learn how children use English. 

Read previous research “Oxford Children’s Corpus: a Corpus of Children’s Writing, Reading, and Education (PDF)

Source: BBC website