Dr Damon Thomas, a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, says it could be highly beneficial if NAPLAN took more notice of the ideas that children are sharing.
“A lot of my research is on NAPLAN, and what we’re really interested in is usually how children are writing, so we’ll check if they have spelt words correctly, have they structured their sentences correctly, what do their paragraphs look like. We’re not that interested in what they’ve got to say, we’re just more interested in how they say it or how they write it,” Thomas tells EducationHQ.
“It would be great if we did something like this with NAPLAN, where we actually took notice of what ideas the children were really sharing.”
In the meantime, he says, Oxford's Australian Children’s Word of the Year (CWOTY) is a “very special study”.
Using data collected through the online program Writing Legends, each year Oxford University Press analyses more than 25,000 children’s stories and almost 2.3 million words written by mostly mid- to late-primary school students.
It found that in 2024, students wrote the most about the value of their relationships with family and friends, the complexities around friendships, and the ways in which they connect with others.
Thomas says one of the powerful things about Oxford’s CWOTY is its sample size and how accurate and important the data is as a result.
“So we can look and see ‘OK, so which words are the children using, which topics are they writing about?'
“[The researchers] look at connections between words, and so they can find themes that emerge out of the millions of words that they’re analysing and then we can look at trends and so we can see certain words come in and out of fashion, and these words often have some link to broader social things that are going on.”
Last year’s CWOTY was ‘cost’, at a time when the cost-of-living crisis was hitting hard.
“It was interesting to see that even young primary school children at an increased rate were writing about topics related to cost or money or finance in the stories that they were writing, so it trickles down.
“When you’ve got your parents making comments at the petrol browser or at the dinner table or on the drive to school, the kids can hear it and they react to it.”
“I've witnessed many schools undertaking a lot of professional learning in the space of reading, however the obvious thing that probably needs some attention would be the teaching of writing,” Dr Damon Thomas, pictured above, says.
This year’s word ‘friend’, was also joined in its popularity by ‘companion’, ‘love’ and ‘play’, all words, Thomas says, that go together and point towards positive interactions with others.
“…there was a considerable increase in the number of children who were basically writing stories or writing texts that involved some element of friendship as a key idea in the story.”
Words such as ‘hope’, and ‘game’ appeared in higher frequencies in 2024 compared to 2023, along with ‘fact’, ‘leader’ and ‘superpower’.
Thomas says ‘friendship’ is particularly interesting, given since 2008 there has been an “amazing” increase in the proportion of young Australians who are reporting feelings of loneliness.
“Once upon a time, it was older generations of Australians who were the loneliest groups, but now it’s at a point where 15-24-year-olds, across several national studies, are lonelier. They’re the loneliest generation – and this is despite the fact that they’re hyper connected.
“They really should have more connections than anyone because they’re more entrenched in that digital world than any other young generation before them.”
Thomas believes this is why the Oxford study landed on ‘friend’.
“It’s a message of hope. It shows that whether it’s coming from the kids themselves, from the wider parents and adults who are talking about friendship, or whether it’s some kind of connection, some kind of combination of both, friendship is on the agenda in the stories and the text that these children are writing.
“It will be really interesting to see the social media ban that’s being brought in for under 16s, whether that has an impact on these rates of loneliness amongst the youngest Australians.”
Other words that stood out as interesting were slang word of the year, ‘sigma’ (which means ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’) and ‘skibbity’ (which means ‘bad,’ ‘cool,’ or ‘weird’ depending on the context).
“They’re the kind of viral words that social media influencers have used and suddenly every child in every school using these words.”
The expert's role at University of Queensland largely involves working with new primary school teachers or people coming through who want to become primary school teachers.
“I’ll teach them all about the theory and the practice of literacy education – so how you teach children to read and write and speak and listen and all the rest of it,” he shares.
His research focuses mainly on writing development and how we teach writing, systemic functional linguistics, argumentation, and standardised assessment.
When asked what he considers to be the biggest issue in primary teaching in relation to literacy and what he would like to see schools prioritising more, not surprisingly he highlights writing.
“Probably the biggest shift that has happened recently have been around the teaching of reading,” he says.
“We’ve seen a real uptake of the science of reading and more cognitive-based approaches to teaching reading, and so this is accompanied by a bigger focus on the main elements of reading, which includes phonics, vocabulary comprehension, phonological awareness, and so on.
“I’ve witnessed many schools undertaking a lot of professional learning in the space of reading, however the obvious thing that probably needs some attention would be the teaching of writing.”
Thomas says at present the area is a bit like “the Wild West”, with a plethora of approaches being applied nationwide.
“Schools and departments of education, the different systems, it seems like everyone’s doing something slightly different,” he laments.
“We have the curriculum, which gives us a guide about the things that should be taught at the end of the day, but how it’s being taught really differs based on where you’re teaching.”
Even within the same school, Thomas says, teachers are teaching writing in different ways.
“And when you’ve got something complex like writing, for the kid’s sake, you want to provide them with something that’s going to be systematic and cohesive and builds a coherent curriculum over time that’s knowledge-rich and connects with all of the disciplines of school.
“So it’s not just 'we’re going to do a writing lesson now', but we’re using our writing in science and we’re using our writing in every different area. So there’d be different genres that are important depending on the discipline.”
Things are not settled with writing in the way that they are with reading, he flags.
“That’s not to say there’s not still some controversy around how reading is taught, but it definitely feels like there’s been a consensus reached for at least how we’re going to teach reading for the next few years.”
To read the full report on Oxford’s Australian CWOTY, click here .
