ABSTRACT This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower level analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in either a story free-writing condition or a story rewriting condition. The results showed that both cohesive indices and lower level writing measures (type-token ratios, mean length of utterances in morphemes, composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amount of the variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved to facilitate the children's writing processes and, hence, resulted in higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and text cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.
Two studies are reported here that investigated elementary school children’s text revision. In the first experiment, both semantic and surface flaws were inserted in texts that varied in reading difficulty. Second-grade through fifth-grade students revised these experimenter-generated passages, presented as examples of submissions to a class newspaper. Differences in text reading difficulty did not affect revision effectiveness, nor were the semantic flaws especially difficult to detect and revise. An age effect showed growth in the revision of both semantic and surface errors from grades 2 to 4 with 2nd-graders revising one-third of the inserted errors, and 4th- and 5th-graders revising three-quarters of them. Revision and cloze reading comprehension skills were correlated. A second study compared students’ revision of their own as well as another’s text flaws. Fifth-graders wrote a narrative for a classroom anthology, and they revised both their own and inserted flaws. Their writing was evaluated holistically. Rates of both semantic and surface revision were somewhat lower for their own as opposed to another’s text errors, but revision rates were nevertheless relatively high, and they correlated with writing quality; that is, children who wrote high-quality texts also revised more errors, especially experimenter-inserted flaws. These data confirm that children respond positively to writing challenges in the area of revision, a skill in process of development, which is amenable to inspection and appears ripe for facilitation.
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As part of a longitudinal study of the development of literacy skills, seven-year-old children wrote and told stories previously read to them. This partial replication of Geva & Olson (1983) examined the charac teristics of story rewriting by hand and by computer, as well as oral story retelling, and their relationships with reading comprehension. The productions of these second graders were comparable to Geva & Olson's six-year-olds' story retelling in use of language forms, reflect ing knowledge of story schemata, and an awareness of the formal characteristics of narrative conventions. The children in this within- subjects design demonstrated few significant psycholinguistic differ ences between production media, in spite of their voiced preference for word-processing activities. Relationships were revealed between reading comprehension and story rewriting and retelling.
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An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
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