Skip to main content
OUP Australia

Oxford Children's Language Australia

The home of children’s language and literacy

A decorative image of a teacher in class

Research and advice by educators, for educators

At Oxford University Press, we are passionate about understanding how Australian children use language. By listening to children's voices and analysing their writing, we gain valuable insights into how language develops and how best to support literacy learning.
To advance this work, we established Oxford Children's Language Australia (OCLA), a research initiative dedicated to deepening understanding of Australian children's language and sharing evidence-based insights with the education community. Through partnerships with leading Australian language and literacy researchers, OCLA supports teachers with practical, research-informed advice to help students build strong language and literacy skills.
By combining rigorous research with practical classroom insights, OCLA helps us create resources that support every child's journey to becoming a confident reader, writer and communicator.

Oxford Children’s Language Australia Corpus

 At the heart of OCLA is the Oxford Children's Language Australia Corpus, Australia's largest longitudinal collection of children's written language. Originating from the landmark Oxford Wordlist research project, the corpus has been continuously developed for more than 18 years and provides a unique window into how Australian children actually use language.


Today, the corpus contains more than 40 million words collected from student writing across Foundation to Year 8 and continues to grow through annual updates. This rich evidence base enables us to develop English and literacy resources grounded in authentic Australian student language, reflecting the words children use, the vocabulary they encounter, and the patterns that shape their reading, writing and spelling development.
The Oxford Children's Language Australia logomark (a blue opening quotation mark slightly overlapping a green closing quotation mark).

The Oxford Children’s Language Australia Corpus includes continuously updated language data that reveals contemporary vocabulary used by Australian children in their own writing. Oxford conducts associated language research to:

  • Record and analyse words that Australian children choose to write
  • Understand the language children need to acquire to read and spell well
  • Help educators to make informed planning decisions when selecting language content
  • Identify the skills to teach so educators can support students to become successful and independent spellers, writers and readers

Our latest research & supported initiatives

  • The language gap in Australian students’ writing

    This research paper presents the collective analysis of Australian students’ writing in years 3 to 7 based on more than 150,000 writing samples and 20 million words.
    Read the report
  • A decorative image of the Oxford Wordlist logo

    Oxford Wordlist

    The Oxford Wordlist includes the 500 most frequently used words by children in their first three years of school. We've examined these word choices against the same demographic criteria used in the first research conducted 10 years ago, and explored what these word choices indicate about how children's identities and social experiences have changed in the past decade.
    Oxford Wordlist

  • Reading for Meaning

    A guide to research on the best-practice teaching of comprehension in today’s world.
    Read the report