Using the Text Processing Tool Textin to Examine Developmental Aspects of School Texts

The purpose with this article is to first make a brief presentation of the functions in the web based text processing tool Textin 1.2, and then to illuminate these functions by putting the program to use within a research project in progress that concerns developmental aspects on texts written by Swedish pupils during school years 5 to 9. The text will begin with a brief description of Textins’ main functions, and then move on to previous research on school texts where computer linguistic methods either were used or could have been used if the technology had been accessible at the time being. The article then continues with a presentation of the results that Textin delivers, and ends with a discussion on these findings.