Observational learning is a successful method for improving writing skills in various genres. We explore effects of a five lesson intervention series based on peer observation. Fifty-five Swedish 5th-grade students aged 10-12 years followed this intervention programme. The students watched short film clips with peers working with texts. Each lesson was organised according to a theme: reader's perception of the text, ordering of events, how to begin a story, how to end a story and how to edit a text. The students wrote four texts during the intervention. The quality of these texts was assessed by a panel of trained raters. Additionally, the language and reading comprehension and working memory capacity were tested. The results show that average text quality had significantly improved at the end of the intervention, and that this improvement was modulated by reading and language comprehension. Three months later, however, text quality was significantly decreased.

Twenty 10- to 18-year-old children and adolescents with varying degrees of hearing impairment (HI) and hearing aids (HA), ranging from mild-moderate to severe, produced picture-elicited narratives in a spoken and written version. Their performance was compared to that of 63 normally hearing (NH) peers within the same age span. The participants with HI and NH showed similar patterns regarding intragroup correlations between corresponding measures of spoken and written narratives. However, the participants with HI had significantly less diverse language than the NH group. The participants with poorer hearing (higher best ear hearing level [BEHL]) produced spoken and written narratives comprising more content words and they also produced written narratives that were less lexically diverse than the participants with better hearing (lower BEHL). The difference as to lexical skills emphasizes the importance of focusing on these skills in the group of children with HI. However, the results give support for a quite optimistic view on the development of narration in children with HI with HA, at least for picture-elicited narratives.

Observational learning has shown to be a successful intervention for writing. Until now, however, studies have only been performed with normal-hearing participants, usually high school or university students. Additionally, there have been conflicting results in whether subjective text quality correlates with one or more objectively measured text characteristics. In this study, we measured the effect of observational learning in a group of four university students with hearing impairment, and compared the results with those of a group of 10 students with normal hearing who did the same intervention, and those of a control group consisting of 10 students with normal hearing who did not do the intervention. Subjective text quality ratings and nine objectively measured text characteristics were collected for three argumentative texts written by each of the participants. In between writing these three texts, the participants in the experimental groups watched a video of a model writer who read out loud and corrected a similar kind of text. The statistical analysis showed significant correlations between the subjective ratings and four out of the nine objective measures, but no significant intervention effect. These findings suggest that observation-learning intervention is most effective when the model writer is a peer learner, and when the intervention is stretched out over time. Additionally, the method may be better suited for learners younger than the ones who were included in the present study.

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