Swedish (L1) and English (L2) Argumentative Writing of Upper Secondary Students with Reading Difficulties

Abstract

Writing has been identified as a challenge for students with reading difficulties. This study contributes to previous research by exploring argumentative writing in L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in a group of students with reading difficulties in upper secondary school. Participants were 19 students with typical reading, 19 students with poor decoding, and 9 students with poor comprehension. A majority of students attended vocational programmes. Written text quality was assessed by using an adapted version of Jacobs et al.’s (1981) analytic scoring scheme including content, organisation, cohesion, vocabulary, language use, spelling, and punctuation. Students with reading difficulties (regardless of reader subgroup) were found to perform poorly in all categories in both L1 and L2, with spelling being particularly challenging in L1, and cohesion, language use, spelling, and punctuation in L2. Significant differences were found between students with poor comprehension and students with typical reading in cohesion, language use and spelling in L2. Few other significant differences were identified possibly due to an overall poor writing outcome also for students with typical reading. This general poor outcome in writing is discussed in relation to previous studies on writing among students with reading difficulties and writing in vocational programmes.

Self-efficacy for writing and written text quality of upper secondary students with and without reading difficulties

“…Content and conceptual development may be affected too. As to spelling, this group's performance has almost been on a par with control groups (Cragg and Nation, 2006;Re and Carretti, 2016), but research has also found opposite results (Sehlström et al, 2022).…”

“…Researchers agree that poor reading comprehension may have a negative impact on written text quality ( Herbert et al, 2020 ; Kim, 2020 ). More specifically, students with poor reading comprehension have difficulties primarily at discourse-level, in such areas as text organization, for example, coherence, cohesion, cohesive devices ( Cox et al, 1990 ; Cragg and Nation, 2006 ; Carretti et al, 2013 , 2016 ; Re and Carretti, 2016 ; Sehlström et al, 2022 ), and lexical and grammatical complexity and syntactic diversity ( Carretti et al, 2013 , 2016 ; Re and Carretti, 2016 ). Content and conceptual development may be affected too.…”

“…Writing in L2 adds an even greater cognitive challenge than writing in L1 for many students with reading difficulties ( Kormos, 2012 ; Sehlström et al, 2022 ). Students with word recognition difficulties struggle with spelling due to lower automation levels of lexical-level skills.…”

“…In the same vein, past scholarship has indicated that students’ reading difficulties may affect their writing performance in the sense that their reading difficulties may spill over on and compromise their writing ( Berninger et al, 2008 ; Torrance et al, 2016 ; Kim, 2020 ). Several studies have revealed that students with word recognition difficulties and students with reading comprehension difficulties may struggle with L1 and L2 writing ( Cragg and Nation, 2006 ; Herbert et al, 2020 ; Kormos, 2020 ; Graham et al, 2021 ; Sehlström et al, 2022 ). Although writing research is a burgeoning field of study, the writing of students with reading difficulties is under-researched ( Berninger et al, 2008 ; Wengelin et al, 2014 ).…”

Tracing the longitudinal role of orthographic knowledge in spelling development from primary to upper‐secondary school

“…Written text quality was examined using Jacobs et al's (1981) analytic scoring scheme. A slight adaptation was utilized as we subdivided the mechanics category into spelling and punctuation, which resulted in a total of seven aspects of text quality: content, organization, cohesion, vocabulary, language use, spelling, and punctuation (see Sehlström et al, 2022 for a detailed description). In this study, only spelling was used.…”