Abstract
Some years ago, to illustrate the direct link between written products and the composing process, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) wrote that “One could keep piling up sticks at random until one accidentally produced a structure that stood up” (p. 41). Although this could be possible for sticks, it is far less likely that something similar would happen in the process of text construction when piling up words on paper. Whenever we recognize a set of words as a text, there is always someone (or some well-trained machine) making decisions as to what words are to be put together and how.
This special issue is devoted to increasing our understanding of the decisions made by writers of different ages, languages, and cultures, and their impact on the outcome of text constructions.
In writing studies, the constructions that are recognizable as texts are called written products, and factors is commonly used for referring to the myriad of diverse circumstances underlying such constructions. In no particular order, we can mention writing processes, acculturation, writing skills, knowledge, motives, and writing tools among the factors that explain writers’ choices. These factors are of different kinds. In referring to writing processes, for example, we might include mental processes, such as planning or brainstorming, but also motor processes, such as handwriting or typing. When mentioning knowledge, we can allude, inter alia, to vocabulary knowledge, topic knowledge, or grammatical knowledge. Similarly, diversity would be found in acculturation processes or in the motives that mobilize writers’ decisions. Acculturation may refer to the appropriation of the characteristics of a discourse genre, the use of specific rhetorical patterns or register, and stance; motives can run from very personal and emotional to academic or bureaucratic. The point is that whenever we encounter a written product, the various factors accounting for the quality of the written product are there. By quality of the written product, or text quality, we mean the specific characteristics and features of the written text, at every possible level of description—from layout through content to voice.
We have focused on two categories: texts or written products and factors that account for their features which are naturally inseparable. There are no texts without production factors, and production factors in writing inevitably yield a written product. Nevertheless, when scholars have turned to writing as an object of inquiry, research has been differentially focused on these two categories—the features of texts and the conditions of production.
To elaborate, people have been composing texts for centuries, and “the arts of writing” have been a subject of teaching from the times when writing was invented; for example, there were writing manuals among cuneiform tablets (Proust, 2011), and the analysis of texts’ features was part of philological studies by ancient scholars in the fourth-century BCE Greek-speaking world. However, it was only during the 1970s and 1980s that writing emerged as a field of empirical inquiry, leading to a systematic reflection on the relations between the art of writing and the features of texts. It is in the context of inquiry that the construct development of writing emerged.
As noted by Applebee (2000), writing development is an ambiguous term: “It can refer to the ordinary developmental course of learning to write, or to the systematic (or less so) curriculum or program of instruction for developing those skills” (p. 92). In our view, the “ordinary developmental course” is part and parcel of the general linguistic and cognitive development of the human mind in literate societies. This distinction enables the discovery of developmental paths that are not a direct reflection of teaching and looks for the interaction between development and instruction. The articles in this special issue showcase the notion of a developmental path by exploring every aspect of text construction (text structure, planning, consideration of audience) at every point in development from very early on. Reflected in this issue is the idea that although development is variable and multidimensional, it is not necessarily idiosyncratic. Individual differences are interpretable, and similar trends are found across languages and cultural contrasts.
Three main paradigms can be discerned in the field of writing research on the basis of their conceptualization of writing development. These notions draw not only on the what but also on the how to write.
The first paradigm conceptualizes writing development as the evolution of structural knowledge and the control of the syntactic and lexical features of written language. Studies in this line work on what writers produce and analyze their decisions, resorting to the tools of corpus linguistics and text analysis; the notion of discourse genre is central to this endeavor. Developmental studies within this perspective have examined the specific ways in which linguistic devices are realized in different discourse genres from a form-function perspective and have come up with a set of text-embedded features that serve as indicators of evolving writing quality (Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2009; McNamara, Crossley, & McCarthy, 2010).
The second paradigm conceives writing development as social participation: The development of individuals as writers must be interpreted in a broader consideration of the social contexts within which writing occurs and develops. Research within this paradigm shows how writers’ participation in social situations and interactions with an audience, other texts, and writing technologies affect the production situation and shape the texts (Bazerman, 2016). This line of studies examines writing as a complex social participatory endeavor where writers assert meaning and establish identity and affiliation (Castello & Iñesta, 2012) in a malleable and adaptive fashion, relying on existing texts and speculating on who the target reader might be and know, and what purpose this text might serve. Many studies of this orientation deploy ethnographic methodologies and observational classroom studies.
The third paradigm views writing as increasing command of strategic knowledge, specifically increasing self-regulation of knowledge, skills, and problem-solving strategies in text construction. It features a cognitive perspective on writing whereby proficient writing is conceived as a goal-directed, problem-solving process in which the writer recruits different types of knowledge, strategies, language, skills, and motivation to produce a well-crafted text. Such process demands high self-regulation and motivation while attending to ideas and production processes (MacArthur & Graham, 2016). Studies within this orientation tend to involve controlled, intervention, and experimental methods and are often related to teaching and school practices. However, writing models that were developed within this paradigm were initially less concerned about the syntactic, lexical, and structural features of texts (Alamargot & Fayol, 2009).
This Issue
In line with the ambiguity posed by Applebee (2000) in regard to writing development, we conceptualize writing development as part of children’s development in rhetorical flexibility—that is, the ability to flexibly use an increasing repertoire of language forms and functions in different social contexts. We are cognizant of the complex network and diverse kinds of factors that may explain the specific characteristics of the written products across the ages. We are also aware, however, that such complexity and diversity cannot be approached in controlled research designs, and therefore, selections must be made of the factors that are attended to as related to text production and of the text features that are taken as outcome variables.
In this special issue, we bring together studies that deal with the trajectory of writing by delineating the relative contribution of a selected set of factors—transcriptional, linguistic, cognitive, strategic, and literacy related—on children’s written text quality spanning across the most formative years of schooling, from first grade to middle school. To highlight cross-linguistic comparisons, we include studies that were carried out on typologically diverse language families (Hebrew, a Semitic language; Romance languages, such as Spanish and Catalan; and Germanic languages, such as English) as well as in the different geo-educational frameworks in which these literacies evolve. The reported studies contain the work presented in a symposium at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Lyon, France, on July 17-21, 2017. This symposium was the outcome of the collaborations and interactions facilitated by the European Literacy Network COST ACTION 1401.
The article by Salas and Caravolas highlights the multiple dimensions children must orchestrate in early text writing when asked what they had done the day before after they had left school. Participants were children learning to write in English, as opposed to those learning to write. This article analyzes text quality in terms of features of transcription, syntactic complexity, and vocabulary knowledge. Two foundational constructs, writing conventions and productivity, are reported. Writing conventions, a common dimension operating across languages, have different weight as children develop these skills and therefore will be subject to cross-linguistic differences. Syntactic complexity measures, though characterized by their instability and little support for a connectivity dimension in the early years of text production, become pivotal in later years of elementary school. Salas and Caravolas’s article is representative of the first paradigm in that it establishes growth in terms of increasing control of writing conventions and other text-based measures considered as indicators of text writing quality. Moreover, it exemplifies foundational cross-linguistic commonalities in spite of differences in orthography, teaching practices, and cultural contrasts.
Uccelli, Deng, Phillips Galloway, and Qin examined summaries of explanatory science texts written by Grade 6 and 7 students from a socioeconomically diverse population. Their purpose was to follow the development of lexico-syntactic and discourse features for academic writing, framed as a social participatory task with selective contextualized features with specific communicational needs, in a period of considerable potential growth in the language of academic writing. They show syntactic growth over time and point to the use of connectives as a significant predictor of text quality. This article fits the first and third paradigms, yet shares the basic ideological premises of the second paradigm in that the text production is explored as academic writing as a social participatory activity, with the specific contextualization of scientific text writing.
The articles by Tolchinsky and by Stavans, Seroussi, and Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, in Spanish and Hebrew, respectively, deal with the development of structural knowledge in two different text genres: descriptive and argumentative texts.
Tolchinsky’s article examines a set of transcription, reading, cognitive, and oral discourse features as possible explanatory factors of the growth in the quality of descriptive text structure. The ability to produce a self-sustained discourse, the skill to handle meaning relation among words, and a good working memory explained differences at a basic level of quality text structure, whereas a higher command of spelling explained developmental changes to more advanced text structure quality. Cross-sectional and longitudinal results show that the structure of the texts evolves from situational bounded elements fulfilling the communicative function of a description to textually required components that take into account the reader’s needs.
Stavans, Seroussi, and Zadunaisky-Ehrlich explored the incipient stages in the development of text quality in argumentative texts in elementary school-age Hebrew-speaking Israeli children. Although literacy-related cognitive, linguistic, transcriptional, and reading abilities are enhancing predictors that improve with age, their contribution to text quality in general, and to text structure in particular, depends on both genre and age. The multidimensionality of and interactions between the indicators that relate to argumentative text structure quality show that initially children produce the basic text structure and deploy the essential elements required to make an argument. Posteriorly, high text quality of their argumentative text, which contains more elaborate genre-specific components such as counterclaims, results in richer, more balanced, and more sophisticated texts. Stavans et al. conclude that the introduction of counterclaims also indicates consideration for the recipient/reader of the text, acknowledging that there may be an opposing opinion or claim to the one taken by the writer, yielding a balanced text in terms of macrostructural components. A more balanced text reflects a greater degree of text autonomy, leading to a multivoiced text that can invite dialogue with different potential readers.
Both Tolchinsky’s and Stavans et al.’s articles conform with the first paradigm as both are focused on the evolution of structural knowledge and control of the syntactic and lexical features of written language.
Lastly, the article by Llaurado and Dockrell, focuses on strategic knowledge, in particular performance in planning, comparing children educated in Catalan and in English (UK), asking whether the plans they developed were related to their language and literacy skills. Although different planning strategies were examined, none of them were found to be related to text productivity or in general to the quality of the written products. Again, despite differences in language, teaching practices, and cultural contrasts, plans are important in writing models and in teaching conception, but they do not affect children’s productions.
The authors in this issue ascribe to the first paradigm (centered on linguistic and structural growth) and the third paradigm (centered on strategic knowledge) for their goals and methodological approaches. They also share the main tenets of sociocultural approaches, in particular in regard to the crucial role of writing for becoming an active member of a knowledge-based society.