Characteristics of written syntax in ten-year-old fourth-graders

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to present an inventory of different types of syntactic constructions found in written discourse of ten-year-old fourth graders, that is, to examine the existing variations in text syntactic structures which were produced by fourth graders. Written text corpus was collected from 88 fourth graders from Belgrade. In three different sessions, students composed three texts in three different genres: narrative, expository, and argumentative. Thematic and genre versatility enriched the corpus and created favourable conditions for elicitation of different types of syntactic constructions. Different quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts from the database were taken into account and analysed: the mean length of text measured by the number of words, the number of utterances, and the mean length of utterance measured by the number of words and clauses, as well as the presence of various types of syntactic constructions (kernel, simple, compound, complex and complex-compound sentences). The frequency of appearance of each of these was then established. The results provide an insight into the average length of texts and sentences produced by the fourth-grade primary school pupils, as well as into the means used to produce them (the kind of sentences they form). The results are much more valuable because they are concerned with examining the syntax in children who are native speakers of Serbian. They also show that in ten-year-olds? texts all the analysed types of sentence structure may appear, but the use frequency varies. Besides providing an inventory of syntactic attainments in written production of ten-year-old children, the research presented a new insight into their syntactic competence. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. OI 178002: Jezici i kulture u vremenu i prostoru i br. OI 179068: Evaluacija tretmana stecenih poremecaja govora i jezika]