Subordinated clauses usage and assessment of syntactic maturity: A comparison of oral and written retellings in beginning writers

Abstract

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Relativization Strategies in Young Spanish –Speaking children: comparison between production and retrieval of narrative performances

“…Pese a que existen muchos trabajos en la literatura de la psicolingüística infantil destinados a explorar cuáles son las condiciones más ecológicas para la elicitación de discurso, y de esta manera, permitir que la evaluación de desempeño resulte una medida representativa de la conducta comunicativa infantil (Barriga Villanueva, 2004;Crain, Mc Kee, & Emiliani, 1990;Silva, 2010) han sido escasos los intentos para crear condiciones de elicitación ecológica en el caso de evaluar el desempeño sintáctico.…”

“…La evaluación de la complejidad sintáctica (ICS, Hunt, 1970;Véliz, 1999), ha sido el indicador que permite evaluar la densidad de subordinación de los textos. Una importante cantidad de estudios han demostrado que la complejidad sintáctica varía en función de las clases textuales que se elicitan (ver revisión en Silva, Sánchez Abchi & Borzone, 2010;Balboa Espinoza, Crespo Allende & Rivaneira Valenzuela, 2012). Así por ejemplo Nippold (2009) halló, en un estudio comparativo acerca de la productividad lingüística y la complejidad sintáctica en dos grupos de niños de 10 años en tres diferentes tareas lingüísticas -una conversación informal y dos diferentes tareas que involucraban conocimiento específico (una conversación sobre ajedrez y la explicación sobre el juego) -, que los indicadores de productividad lingüística y complejidad sintáctica fueron mayores en la explicación sobre el juego.…”

Assessing writing ability in primary education : on the evaluation of text quality and text complexity

“…Moreover, compared to spoken language, the written language produced by young children is shorter and of lower quality (Berninger & Swanson, 1994). It is commonly assumed that these differences are caused by the demanding cognitive process of translating thoughts into words (Silva, Sánchez Abchi, & Borzone, 2010). In addition, novice writers are likely to be hindered by the specific demands of producing written language, namely constructing a text to be read by a distant reader .…”

“…In this stage, writers translate their thoughts and ideas into words, a process during which they need to take into account all the specific demands of written language in order to produce a text that is comprehensible to a targeted reader. It is assumed that this process places heavy demands on working memories of novice writers, thus constraining their written output (Flower & Hayes, 1981;Silva et al, 2010).…”

“…Hence, the low density of clauses indicates high writing ability, which corresponds to the present finding that clause density decreases with writing ability. Furthermore, Silva et al (2010) stated that "syntactic maturity" develops with age and that the length of clauses and phrases increases with grade level, as does the use of subordinate clauses. An increase in the number of subordinate clauses is commonly found to be indicative of writing ability, see for example Hunt (1966) and the results of the Dutch national assessment ( .…”