Serendipity and surprise: A diachronic analysis of International Baccalaureate in the global press 1977-2019

Fitzgerald, Saira 2024. Serendipity and surprise: A diachronic analysis of International Baccalaureate in the global press 1977-2019. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 7 , pp. 125-151. 10.18573/jcads.118

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Abstract

This study examines perceptions of the International Baccalaureate (IB) over five decades to better understand its growing influence on education systems around the world. As part of the global education industry, the IB plays an important role in shaping national public education discourse. Building on previous synchronic analyses that used a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach, the present study conducts a diachronic exploration of the same 28 million word corpus of global press articles to see how perceptions of the IB may have changed over its 55-year history. Trends over time revealed five main shifts in IB discourse: (i) from education to brand; (ii) from concrete curriculum-related lexis to recurring value-laden terms; (iii) from comparison to competition with other national curricula; (iv) from academic qualification to institutional regulation; and (v) from students to IB coordinator. Findings also showed a stable group of collocates that occurred consistently across all time periods, pointing to an “invariant core” (Morley & Partington, 2009) meaning of the IB that provides fresh insight into how the dominant view of the IB as a singular standardized brand may be entrenched and taken for granted.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2515-0251
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 June 2024
Date of Acceptance:	8 January 2024
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2024 09:44
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169650

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