Syntactic development in Chilean students’ narrative and expository discourse throughout schooling: different measures of syntactic complexity /Desarrollo sintáctico en narraciones y exposiciones orales de estudiantes chilenos a través de la escolaridad: diferentes mediciones de complejidad sintáctica

Abstract

While there are studies that describe early syntactic development, less research has focused on oral syntactic development in Spanish throughout schooling according to text structure. This article describes syntactic patterns in Chilean school age students and compares the differences between narrative and expository discourse. The oral production of 462 students aged 5-18 years old from eight schools in a central Chilean region was analysed. Their oral productions were transcribed and segmented at clause and clause package levels; clause package length, clause package density and the clause density were calculated. Results show that students are more productive and construct more complex syntactical discourse as they advance through their education. The results also suggest that syntactic development patterns function differently in narrative and expository discourses. This indicates that students firstly master their syntactic resources before producing narratives. In addition, the implications of using different syntactic measures to describe syntactic development by text structure are explored.

Complejidad Lingüística: Revisión Bibliográfica

“…A nuestro modo de ver, sí es conveniente incluir criterios de orden semántico y pragmático, que den cuenta de aspectos como las relaciones entre eventos, la cohesión (Plakans y Bilki, 2016;Solnyshkina et al, 2017) o tipos de actos de habla (directos, indirectos, literales, no literales). Así mismo, es importante el análisis teniendo en cuenta la tipología textual (Allende et al, 2017;Aravena y Hugo, 2016;Meneses y Ow, 2016).…”