The Contribution of Word-, Sentence-, and Discourse-Level Abilities on Writing Performance: A 3-Year Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Writing is a foundational skill throughout school grades. This study analyzed the development of different levels of written language (word, sentence, and discourse) and explored the relationship between these levels and writing performance. About 95 Portuguese students from two cohorts—Grades 4–7 (n = 47) 6–9 (n = 48)—were asked to produce a descriptive text two times, with a 3-year interval. The produced texts were used to assess spelling, syntactic correctness and complexity, and descriptive discourse as well as text length and quality. The main results showed that there were improvements from Grades 4 to 7 and 6 to 9 in word- and sentence-level skills, along with increases in some dimensions of the descriptive discourse. Moreover, the older cohort performed better than the younger cohort in terms of spelling, syntactic complexity, and text quality, but not in terms of syntactic correctness, one dimension of the descriptive discourse, and text length. Regression analyses showed that writing performance was predicted by word and sentence levels in the younger cohort only, and by discourse-level variables in both cohorts. Overall, despite indicating a generalized growth in writing skills throughout schooling, this study also highlighted the areas that may need additional attention from teachers, mainly in terms of the descriptive features.

What spelling errors can tell us about the development of processes involved in children’s spelling

“…One way to achieve this is to move away from the traditional binary correct vs. incorrect scoring method. Research has suggested that looking at children's misspellings beyond the dichotomous scoring system might reveal patterns of development in linguistic knowledge (Masterson and Apel, 2010;de Bree and van den Boer, 2019;Treiman et al, 2019; for non-English orthographies see also Niolaki and Masterson, 2012;Carvalhais et al, 2020Carvalhais et al, , 2021 and underlying cognitive processes that children use when they spell (Caravolas et al, 2001;Kessler, 2009;Treiman et al, 2016). These processes involve perception, attention, memory and expertise, all of which past research has explored in considerable depth (Georgiou et al, 2012;Rønneberg and Torrance, 2019;Zoccolotti et al, 2020;Niolaki et al, 2022).…”

“…The non-binary measures rely, for example, on how close the misspelled word is to the correct spelling and can be used as a fine-grained measure to monitor the progress a child is making in developing spelling skills (Masterson and Apel, 2010). Many children, especially in the Foundation Year, produce more errors than correct responses (Georgiou et al, 2020;Carvalhais et al, 2021), and the measures can provide us with a clear picture of the use of lexicalsemantic and sublexical processes, and how children's reliance on these processes changes as they progress in spelling skill. Also, error analysis is not affected by floor effects which is an issue when we solely look at accuracy especially for young spellers (Treiman et al, 2019).…”

“…In a longitudinal and cohort study with 95 Portuguese students from two age groups-Grades 4-7 and 6-9, Carvalhais et al (2021) conducted spelling error analyses and looked at phonological plausibility as one of the critical variables. They found that younger children made more misspellings than the older children and phonologically inappropriate errors were less in the older group.…”

Monitoring indicators of scholarly language: A progress monitoring tool for documenting changes in narrative complexity over time

“…Discourse can be defined as text or spoken language beyond the sentence level (Hughes et al, 1997;Nicolosi et al, 2004), while narratives are a genre of discourse also known as stories (Berman and Nir-Sagiv, 2007;Graham et al, 2013;Dockrell et al, 2014). Knowledge and use of narrative discourse requires a child to produce stories that contain specific structural features of narrative language and serves a specific communicative goal (Berman and Nir-Sagiv, 2007;Carvalhais et al, 2021). Narrative discourse is valued in the study of school-aged children's language because the ability to successfully produce a narrative is considered an important developmental milestone and is included in the Common Core State Standards for students in the United States (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).…”

Continuous norming in learning progress monitoring—An example for a test in spelling from grade 2–4

“…Accordingly, Peng et al (2019) showed that word reading developmental trajectories did not close until a hypothesized performance plateau was reached in the U.S. In a more recent study, Carvalhais et al (2021) traced the developmental paths at word, sentence, and discourse levels in Portugal. Lower results corresponded to lower academic years between grades 4 and 7 as well as 6 and 9.…”