The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish

Tolchinsky, Liliana; Rosado, Elisa

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2004.08.008

Cited by 46 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…The category of ''expository'' may refer to a number of non-narrative genres, such as persuasive essays, descriptions, procedural texts, or compare/ contrast texts. For example, in their influential series of cross-linguistic developmental studies comparing the linguistic features of student writing in two genres, Berman and her colleagues (see Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2007;Berman & Verhoeven, 2002;Jisa, Reilly, Verhoeven, Baurch, & Rosado, 2002;Tolchinsky & Rosado, 2005), used a ''deliberately broad definition of expository discourse'' for their writing tasks that led them to conclude that ''the expository discussions we analyzed also differed markedly from other non-narrative discourse such as descriptions and persuasion'' (Berman & Katzenberger, 2004, p. 59). In these studies, students at four grade levels (fourth grade, seventh grade, eleventh grade, and graduate school) watched a short video depicting a variety of conflicts in a school setting, after which they were asked to write a story about a personal experience with conflict (narrative) and to write a composition discussing problems between people (expository).…”

Section: Later Syntactic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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%

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

2010

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“…They are also highly consistent with analyses of larger linguistic units in the same and related data-bases. Findings from a range of independent studies highlight the critical role of adolescence in rhetorical expression, for example: in downgrading of agency (Tolchinsky and Rosado 2005); in syntactic packaging and clauselinkage (Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2009); in narrative evaluation (Ravid and Berman 2006); and in how speaker-writers introduce and conclude the texts they construct (Berman and Katzenberger 2004;Tolchinsky, Johanssen, and Zamora 2002). As noted for command of global discourse structure in both English and Hebrew, "in developmental terms, these results underline the special status of adolescence as a watershed in developing cognitive and communicative abilities.…”

Section: Register In Later Language Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing linguistic register across text types

Ravid

Berman²

2009

P&C

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The study considers the topic of linguistic register by examining how schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults vary the texts that they construct across the dimensions of modality (spoken/written discourse) and genre (narrative/expository discourse). Although register variation is presumably universal, it is realized in language-specific ways, and so our analysis focuses on Israeli Hebrew, a language that evolved under peculiar socio-historical circumstances. An original procedure for characterizing register -as low, neutral, or high -was applied to four text types produced by the same speaker-writers. We found that across all age groups, "neutral" items constituted the bulk of the material, and that the lexicon accounted for some 80% of variation. Developmentally, we found that acquisition of fully flexible register variation continues beyond adolescence. Finally, we observed that text types range on a cline from everyday colloquial usage in oral narratives to more formal, high-level language in written expository essays. These results are discussed in light of their implications for the nature of register variation, later language development, and the sociolinguistics of contemporary Hebrew.

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“…This underlies the developmental shifts we found between narrative and expository texts on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict. Relatedly, Tolchinsky and Rosado (2005) found that an increase in "the repertoire of agency downgrading devices coincides with an increase in the abstractness and explicit specification of the topics in the [expository] texts" (p. 232), whereas Reilly et al (2005) described age-related changes in modal auxiliaries as reflecting "a shift from culturally and socially determined norms to a more cognitively determined and less subjective orientation to events and situations" (p. 203). These observations point to expository discourse as an optimal site for recruiting a sophisticated linguistic repertoire to meet the discursive demands of discussing an abstract topic.…”

Section: Intergenre Distinctiveness and Divergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Narrative and Expository Text Construction Across Adolescence: A Developmental Paradox

Berman¹,

Nir-Sagiv²

2007

Discourse Processes

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In this study we argue that narrative storytelling and expository discussion, as 2 distinct discourse genres, differ both in linguistic expression and in their underlying principles of organization-schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition. Innovative analyses applied to 160 personal-experience narratives and expository essays written by schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict point to certain apparently contradictory facts about developing discourse abilities in the 2 genres. For example, genre differentiation is established early on (even the youngest children distinguish between the 2 types of discourse), but with age, participants tend to diverge from genre-typical content (by including expository-type generalizations in narratives and narrative-like incidents in expository texts). Also, across age groups, in local linguistic expression, participants use more advanced vocabulary and grammar in expository than in narrative texts, but in global-level discourse organization, they achieve command of expository text construction only in adolescence, whereas the principles governing narratives are established by middle childhood. We suggest that this apparent paradox can be accounted for by several interlocking factors: cognitive and linguistic development, increased experience with different varieties of discourse, and the communicative context in which a piece of discourse is produced.This study compares how schoolchildren and adolescents construct narrative and expository texts, analyzed as two different genres, that is, as types of discourse defined by different communicative goals and functions (Grimshaw, 2003;Paltridge, 1997;Steen, 1999). Narratives are agent-oriented; that is, they focus on people, their actions and motivations, and express the unfolding of events in a temporal DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 43(2), 79-120

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The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish

Cited by 46 publications

References 43 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

Developing linguistic register across text types

Comparing Narrative and Expository Text Construction Across Adolescence: A Developmental Paradox

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