Writing an Independently Composed Sentence by Spanish-Speaking Children With and Without Poor Transcription Skills: A Writing-Level Match Design

Abstract

The main objective of this research was to analyze the impact of transcription skills of Spanish writers when writing an independently composed sentence within a writing-level design. The free-writing sentence task from the Early Grade Writing Assessment (Jiménez, in press) was used to examine the production, accuracy, speed, syntactic complexity, quality, and fluency of children with poor transcription skills (PTS). The results showed that there were significant differences between children with PTS and peers who had good transcription skills. The PTS group members were less accurate, slower, and less fluent or even dysfluent. Furthermore, their sentences were less complex and contained lower quality content. These results suggest that transcription skills play a crucial role in early written expression in Spanish, and poor transcription abilities hamper the acquisition and normal development of sentence composition.

Examining the transcription-writing link: Effects of handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy on writing performance via planning and translating in middle grades

“…Notably, these differences between oral and written stories were substantially reduced in Grade 4, where transcription skills are more developed and demand less attentional resources. Moreover, it was recently reported that the syntactic complexity of sentences produced by a group of third graders with poor transcription skills was significantly lower than those produced by an aged-matched group but equivalent to transcription matched group of first graders (García, Crespo, & Bermúdez, 2016). Correlational evidence also suggested that, at least in school-aged writers, higher TRANSCRIPTION-WRITING LINK 9 transcription skills are associated with higher syntactic skills (Berninger et al, 2011;Kim, Al Otaiba, Wanzek, & Gatlin, 2014;Puranik, Lombardino, & Altmann, 2008;Wagner et al, 2011).…”

“…Additionally, we predicted that higher handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy would be associated with better planning and translating skills. These hypotheses stem from experimental and correlational research showing that, not only in primary but also in middle grades, transcription constrains the generation and organization of ideas (e.g., Limpo & Alves, 2013a) as well as the transformation of these ideas into syntactically correct sentences (e.g., García et al, 2016). By modeling handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy separately, we were also able to examine whether these two transcription processes are differentially associated with planning and translating.…”

Text Writing within Simple Sentences: A Writing Fluency Intervention for Students with High‐Incidence Disabilities

“…These three levels are interrelated and dynamic; each promotes overall writing development and changes across grade levels (Berninger & Amtmann, 2003;Limpo, Alves, & Connelly, 2016). Indeed, research shows that transcription skills at the sublexical and lexical levels promote the quantity and quality of text (Berninger et al, 2002;Datchuk & Kubina, 2013;Garcia, Crespo, & Bermúdez, 2017). Additionally, composition at the text level relates to overall writing quality (Ritchey et al, 2016).…”

Copy Skills and Writing Abilities in Children With and Without Specific Learning Disabilities

“…Indeed, the results of the factor analysis confirmed that basic writing skills can be divided into the three predicted components, although part of it remained unexplained, suggesting that, with a larger variety of measures, a more complete articulation of writing skills could be found. The three components were spelling skills (percentages of errors in different forms of dictation and in expressive writing tasks), handwriting speed (numbers of letters written when writing “le,” “one,” numbers in letters), and richness of expressive writing (number of words in expressive writing tasks), as observed in other languages (García et al, 2017; Yan et al, 2012). Most of the variance was explained by the spelling factor.…”