The role of cross-disciplinary academic language skills in disciplinary, source-based writing: investigating the role of core academic language skills in science summarization for middle grade writers

The Language Demands of Analytical Reading and Writing at School

“…Students’ CALS were also significantly, moderately, and positively related to their persuasive essays’ writing quality ( r = .45; p value < .0001). Consistent with prior research on the positive relation between mid-adolescents’ CALS and their science summaries’ quality (Phillips Galloway, Qin, et al, 2020; Uccelli et al, 2019), these findings revealed that students with higher receptive knowledge of analytical language resources tended to produce persuasive essays of higher quality. Reading comprehension and PE writing quality also displayed a significant, moderate relation ( r = .41; p value < .0001).…”

“…CALS performances were also found to be positively correlated with the production of dictionary-like definitions (Uccelli et al, 2015). For English-speaking mid-adolescents’ science summaries, receptive CALS, their comprehension of the source text, and their productive language resources independently predicted the quality of their summaries, even after accounting for students’ sociodemographic characteristics and general summary features (i.e., length and copy ratio) (Phillips Galloway & Uccellli, 2019a; Phillips Galloway, Qin, et al, 2020). Moreover, in a longitudinal study, we found that sixth-graders’ summary-based diversity of connectives and CALS predicted the quality of their science summaries in seventh grade.…”

“…That said, receptive CALS have been examined in relation to various school-relevant written genres, including persuasive essays, dictionary-like definitions, scientific summaries, and explanations, in socioeconomically diverse samples. CALS as predictor of writing quality has been examined in samples of English-speaking students attending U.S. public schools (e.g., Andreev & Uccelli, 2023; Deng et al, 2022; Phillips Galloway & Uccelli, 2019a; Phillips Galloway, Qin, et al, 2020; Uccelli et al, 2015), English-as-world-language learners attending school in Korea or China (Jo, 2021b), and Spanish-speaking students attending Chilean public schools (Figueroa et al, 2018). Despite differences in the composition of mid-adolescent samples, the specific research questions examined, and the magnitude of the relations between CALS and writing quality across studies, receptive CALS scores have shown to contribute consistently and positively to the quality of students’ writing (as scored by teachers who were blind to the studies’ questions).…”

Cross-disciplinary language changes in 4th graders as a predictor of the quality of written scientific explanation

“…These resources enable technicality (disciplinary vocabulary and extended noun phrases), the development of evidence-based reasoning (causal patterns), and the projection of an objective voice, among others (Avalos et al, 2017;de Oliveira & Lan, 2014;Rappa & Tang, 2018;Seah, 2016;Seah et al, 2011). Little research explores the contribution of crossdisciplinary language to the quality of the science genre (Phillips Phillips Galloway et al, 2020). Uccelli et al (2019) examine the developmental trajectories of specific language skills for constructing science summaries from a longitudinal perspective; however, studies exploring the contribution of cross-disciplinary language to the quality of the authentic science genre are scarce.…”

Writing in Science

“…The writing of a scientific paper is, then, undeniably relevant to science itself, the academics' career and the students' success, especially graduate students Sanganyado, 2019;Sayer, 2019;Ramírez-Castañeda, 2020;Jusino, 2020;Badenhorst & Xu, 2016;Chen, 2019;Phillips Galloway, Qin, Uccelli, & Barr, 2019). However, this topic still needs to be clarified to improve the researchers' scientific writing competences (Huerta & Garza, 2019;Wortman-Wunder & Wefes, 2020;Renck Jalongo & Saracho, 2016;Sá et al, 2020), although each journal provides specific information in the guidelines for authors (Flores-Mir, 2019;Sanganyado, 2019;Mestres & Sampathkumar, 2019;Wickman & Fitzgerald, 2018;Neill, 2019).…”