Developing Linguistic Knowledge and Language Use Across Adolescence

Berman, Ruth A.

doi:10.1002/9780470757833.ch17

Cited by 89 publications

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“…Second, using these measures situates this study within the long trajectory of research on syntactic complexity, allowing for replication, clarification, and expansion of previous findings. Third, these measures of syntactic complexity are still considered reliable indices of syntactic density (Berman, 2009 Measures of syntactic complexity Many attempts to quantify syntactic complexity have focused on a number of sentence-level text features, such as the number of words per sentence, the number of words per clause, the ratio of subordinate clauses to all clauses, and the number of words included in a ''minimal terminable unit'' (T-unit), which Hunt (1970) defined as ''one main clause plus any subordinate clause or nonclausal structure that is attached to or embedded in it'' (p. 4). Hunt (1965Hunt ( , 1970 determined that three measures of syntactic complexity were the most reliable indicators of increasing maturity in writing: clauses per T-unit, words per clause, and words per T-unit.…”

Section: Later Syntactic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Students must also learn the communicative purposes of different genres, along with their organizational structures. Additionally, students must acquire the linguistic resources to compose in academic genres, including the use of more sophisticated word forms and syntactic structures (Berman, 2009). Certain syntactic structures, such as subordinate clauses, relative clauses, and complex noun phrases allow writers to express more complex ideas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Writing development in four genres from grades three to seven: syntactic complexity and genre differentiation

2010

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Two measures of syntactic complexity, clauses per T-unit and words per clause, were used to examine differences among four genres of text-narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, and persuasive-written by the same two cohorts (83 students in grades three and five and 96 students in grades five and seven) on two occasions 2 years apart as part of a larger longitudinal study. For clauses per T-unit, a measure of subordination, significant differences were found between persuasive essays, which had more subordinate clauses, and the other three genres. For words per clause, an indicator of the denser syntax of the academic register, significant differences were found between descriptive texts, which had more words per clause than the persuasive essays, which did not differ from the compare/contrast texts. Over the grade levels studied, the measures of syntactic complexity did not increase in their differentiation among the four genres. The two measures of syntactic complexity were negatively correlated, especially for the persuasive essays. For text length, which is thought to reflect compositional fluency, grade, genre, and grade 9 genre effects were significant for both cohorts. Post hoc analyses found few examples of the syntax-level structures characteristic of the academic register. These findings suggest that although students could produce each kind of genre, their ability to do so may have been compromised by their limited knowledge of the syntactic structures required to achieve text-level genre goals. Researchers and educators should consider the syntactic-and text-level requirements for different school-based genres in designing and evaluating writing instruction.

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Section: Later Syntactic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing development in four genres from grades three to seven: syntactic complexity and genre differentiation

2010

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“…Note that most research on L1 acquisition is limited to studies related to the first ten years of life. Too little research has been conducted on L1 development in adolescents and adults (for reviews, see Berman, 2007, andNippold, 2006; see also Hulstijn, in progress, Chapter 7).…”

Section: The Association Of Cefr Levels With Intellectual Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

Hulstijn

2014

ITL

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The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001) currently functions as an instrument for educational policy and practice. The view of language proficiency on which it is based and the six proficiency levels it defines lack empirical support from language-use data. Several issues need to be investigated collaboratively by researchers working in the fields of first and second language acquisition, corpus linguistics and language assessment. These issues are concerned with (i) the CEFR's failure to consistently distinguish between levels of language proficiency (static aspect) and language development (dynamic aspect), (ii) with the CEFR's confounding of levels of language proficiency and intellectual abilities, and (iii) the potential problem of mismatches between second-language learners' communicative and linguistic competences. Furthermore, from a more theoretical perspective, this paper proposes (iv) to investigate which CEFR proficiency levels are attainable by native speakers and (v) to empirically delineate the lexical, morpho-syntactic and pragmatic knowledge shared by all native speakers (called Basic Language Cognition).

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“…Furthermore, it if often asserted that grammatical development is complete by age four or five iii ; and if four-year-olds know all there is know about (basic) grammar, then presumably adults' speech to them does not differ grammatically from ordinary adult directed speech. Actually, however, children's grammars continue to evolve until well into adolescence or even later, mainly a result of experience with written language (Berman 2004(Berman , 2007Hoffer 1994;Nippold 1998;Nippold et al 2005). Thus, while language addressed to a five-year-old is likely to be more complex than that addressed to younger children, it could still be grammatically and/or lexically simpler than adult-adult conversation.…”

Section: The Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Recycling utterances: A speaker's guide to sentence processing

Dąbrowska

2014

Cognitive Linguistics

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Developing Linguistic Knowledge and Language Use Across Adolescence

Cited by 89 publications

References 0 publications

Writing development in four genres from grades three to seven: syntactic complexity and genre differentiation

Writing development in four genres from grades three to seven: syntactic complexity and genre differentiation

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

Recycling utterances: A speaker's guide to sentence processing

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