The Common Core State Standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) feature argumentative writing across the curriculum in grades 4 through 12, yet little is known about how young adolescents develop the challenging advanced language and literacy skills needed for these tasks. This study explored productive academic language use in the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of sustained practice with argumentation on the quality of students' written arguments. Participants consisted of 37 students; 22 males and 15 females enrolled in a 6th grade middle school classroom. Students completed six argumentation tasks but only four of them were considered for data…

Understanding academic vocabulary is essential to student success in school. Use of academic vocabulary words in writing is considered one of the strongest measures of how well a reader understands a given word. In theory, willingness to use academic vocabulary in writing indicates the complexity of acquiring representations of the word's…

Standardised tasks and a repeat design were used to investigate development in narrative writing by 112 primary schoolchildren. The scripts comprised the NFER "Literacy Impact" Writing Test B, completed near the end of the children's second terms in Year 5 and Year 6. The test includes a narrative task using content of appeal to both genders. The…

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the…