The Contribution of Reading Abilities to the Writing Quality of Expository Text Structure in Hebrew Speaking Elementary School Children

Literacy-Related Abilities’ Effects on Argumentative Text Quality Structure

“…Broader aspects of reading–writing relations have been reported (Shanahan & Lomax, 1986), where reading-related skills (e.g., word analysis, vocabulary size, and comprehension) interactively influenced writing-related skills (e.g., spelling, vocabulary use, syntactic knowledge, and knowledge of story structure) among second through fifth graders. Similarly, high and low reading skills were related to composition quality and fluency among first to fourth graders (Abbott & Berninger, 1993; Stavans et al, in press), and third graders’ word-reading ability (i.e., word identification) was positively related to compositional quality, after accounting for gender, compositional fluency, IQ, and grammatical understanding (Olinghouse, 2008). Moreover, the relations found between the reading skills and the structure of the texts vary across ages, genres, and text components.…”

“…Moreover, the relations found between the reading skills and the structure of the texts vary across ages, genres, and text components. This variability and the strength of the relations is evidence that writing in elementary school evolves slowly, and that some reading skills do not seem to be related to text structure production (Stavans et al, in press).…”

Predictors of spelling errors in expository texts written by Hebrew-speaking elementary school children (Predictores de errores ortográficos en textos expositivos escritos por alumnos de habla hebrea en escuela primaria)

“…To begin with, reading fluency has been associated with good reading comprehension skills, as automatic and precise reading frees attentional resources to engage in higher comprehension processes (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). In particular, stronger relationships between reading fluency and comprehension were found in transparent orthographies, such as Dutch or Hebrew in the dotted version (Stavans et al, 2020). It is also worth mentioning that reading fluency, as measured by rate and accuracy, showed a linear development in Hebrew-speaking children from the second to sixth grades, even in the transition from reading the shallow, transparent and pointed version to reading the deep version without the diacritic marks (Shany et al, 2012).…”

“…Each text included fifteen multiple-choice questions, which were piloted beforehand in elementary school children who did not participate in the present study. A general reading comprehension score was calculated as the total percent of correct answers in both reading comprehension tests that were found as highly correlated across all grade levels (Stavans et al, 2020).…”

“…Cada texto incluyó quince preguntas de opción múltiple, que se probaron de antemano en niños de escuela primaria que no participaron en el presente estudio. Se calculó la comprensión lectora general basada en el porcentaje total de respuestas correctas en ambas pruebas de comprensión lectora que se hallaron previamente altamente correlacionadas en todos los niveles de grado (Stavans et al, 2020).…”