Children with specific language impairments (SLI) have difficulties in producing written text. It was hypothesised that the constraints on writing in children with SLI were similar to typically developing younger children with the same level of vocabulary knowledge. Twenty-three children with SLI (aged 10:5) were matched with 23 children for…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

This study examines the effectiveness of written error corrections versus reformulations of second language learners' writing as two means of improving learners' grammatical accuracy on a three-stage composition-comparison-revision task. Concurrent verbal protocols were employed during the comparison stage in order to study the learners' reported…

As children move toward learning specified forms of writing, they organize print in their environment and learn generalized communication strategies. Learning to write is developmentally similar to the acquisition of oral language. Ten stages are suggested for understanding the development of children's writing. (JN)

Ease of language processing varies with the nature of the language involved. Ordinary spoken language is the easiest kind to produce and understand, while writing is a relatively new development. On thoughtful inspection, the readability of writing has shown itself to be a complex topic requiring insights from many academic disciplines and…

Investigated ways in which different writing tasks influence quality and quantity of foreign language composition, as well as writing strategies used by American college students when composing in Japanese as a foreign language. Study proposed to compare qualitative and quantitative differences between descriptive and narrative writing tasks; to…

Intensive peer review is a method of teaching expository writing developed two years ago by A. N. Doane and now used extensively in freshman expository writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students meet regularly in groups of four three times a week over the course of the term to share and critique each other's writing. The instructor…

There appear to be two basic theories about the relationship of written language to oral language and the relationship of writing to reading. The first theory views written language as a derivative of oral language and as an alternate but parallel form of oral language. The pedagogical implications of this model suggest that the problems of…

The validity of recent research concerning invented spelling, the developmental stages in children's writing, and whether children will attempt writing before reading and continue writing while learning to read were examined. Five developmental stages in spelling have been identified: (1) the precommunicative stage, involving the use of random…

Described in this report is a longitudinal study that examined the transition that children make from oral to written texts in respect to their use of cohesive devices and particular story structure elements in two modes of oral and one mode of written language. The first section provides an overview of the study and discusses literacy…

A study of the written language that was produced within one junior high school social studies classroom over a 38-minute period was based on the assumptions that (1) written language is not only affected by the context of the communicative event in which it is involved, but is also involved in the construction of the communicative event; (2) the…

Teaching organizational strategies to language-disordered children can improve comprehension and formulation of written language. The semantic organizer approach involves activating and organizing prior knowledge, understanding text structure, and developing organizational strategies with both a verbal component and a graphic-structure component.…

This is the first of two related documents reporting a study that analyzed the text of 26 student-teacher dialogue journals from a sixth grade class as a developmental link between students' natural competence in oral conversation and their developing competence in written language. The first section of the report discusses (1) the purpose of the…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

Designed to explore the ways language functions to help children gain access to meaning as they progress through the educational system, this journal issue views communication as a social, interactive process in which speakers and writers attempt to link into what listeners and readers know, want to know, or need to know. The 12 articles in the…