The secret life of connectives: a taxonomy to study individual differences in mid-adolescents’ use of connectives in writing to persuade

Andreev, Linda; Uccelli, Paola

doi:10.1007/s11145-023-10425-3

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Across grades, students display a higher lexical precision, syntactic conciseness, and cohesive connectivity (Berman, 2009;Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2007;Christie & Derewianka, 2008;Fang & Park, 2020;Schleppegrell, 2004). Aligned with this research, quantitative studies have documented the positive contribution of lexico-grammatical resources (i.e., precise vocabulary; complex words and sentences; use of connectives, such as in contrast, furthermore) to analytical writing in middle school (Andreev & Uccelli, 2023;Beers & Nagy, 2011;Deng et al, 2022), high school (Uccelli et al, 2013), and college students (Crossley et al, 2011). For middle schoolers' argumentative writing, in particular, recent research has found that use of adversative connectives was associated with more complex argumentative essays (Taylor et al, 2018).…”

Section: Language and Writing Relations Throughout Mid-adolescencementioning

confidence: 62%

“…That said, receptive CALS have been examined in relation to various school-relevant written genres, including persuasive essays, dictionary-like definitions, scientific summaries, and explanations, in socioeconomically diverse samples. CALS as predictor of writing quality has been examined in samples of English-speaking students attending U.S. public schools (e.g., Andreev & Uccelli, 2023; Deng et al, 2022; Phillips Galloway & Uccelli, 2019a; Phillips Galloway, Qin, et al, 2020; Uccelli et al, 2015), English-as-world-language learners attending school in Korea or China (Jo, 2021b), and Spanish-speaking students attending Chilean public schools (Figueroa et al, 2018). Despite differences in the composition of mid-adolescent samples, the specific research questions examined, and the magnitude of the relations between CALS and writing quality across studies, receptive CALS scores have shown to contribute consistently and positively to the quality of students’ writing (as scored by teachers who were blind to the studies’ questions).…”

Section: Language and Writing Relations Throughout Mid-adolescencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For English-speaking mid-adolescent writers (Grades 5-8), CALS scores have been found to be positively associated with persuasive essays’ writing quality and writers’ essay-based syntactic skills (Deng et al, 2022), and found to be predictive of persuasive writing quality, even after accounting for sociodemographic characteristics and essay-based linguistic features (Andreev & Uccelli, 2023). CALS performances were also found to be positively correlated with the production of dictionary-like definitions (Uccelli et al, 2015).…”

Section: Language and Writing Relations Throughout Mid-adolescencementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Language Demands of Analytical Reading and Writing at School

Uccelli¹

2023

Written Communication

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Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners’ school-relevant language resources that are of high utility to understanding analytical texts across content areas. After a brief review of the relations between mid-adolescents’ language and their school reading and writing proficiencies, I offer illustrative examples of individual differences in middle-schoolers’ analytical writing and CALS. I argue, on the basis of recent but extensive empirical evidence, that without understanding and addressing the immense variability in the language resources that students bring to school and the language demands of reading- and writing-to-learn tasks and texts, schools run the risk of maintaining and even exacerbating the inequalities that exist in the larger society.

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Section: Language and Writing Relations Throughout Mid-adolescencementioning

confidence: 62%

Section: Language and Writing Relations Throughout Mid-adolescencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Language and Writing Relations Throughout Mid-adolescencementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Language Demands of Analytical Reading and Writing at School

Uccelli¹

2023

Written Communication

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What Is Important to Measure in Sentence-Level Language Comprehension?

Sarmiento,

Truckenmiller

2024

Assessment for Effective Intervention

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Educators and researchers have been interested in supporting sentence-level language comprehension for struggling readers, but it has been challenging to research. To investigate the properties of sentences that might be useful targets for future research in instruction and assessment, we coded several features of the items in a computer-adaptive scale of sentence comprehension. The Syntactic Knowledge Task is designed for students in Grades 3–10. We then explored how the features of the sentences were related to the item’s difficulty value to determine which aspects of sentence-level language made sentences more and less challenging for students across a range of development. We found that genre, words that represent a logical connection, number of idea units, long words, and words on the Academic Word List were significantly associated with item difficulty. Implications for understanding students’ sentence-level language development are discussed.

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Connective Frequency Bands informed by textbook frequencies and midadolescents’ knowledge of connectives: a tool to support Spanish literacy instruction across content areas

Meneses,

Arriagada,

Caro

et al. 2023

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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This study focuses on connectives, linguistic devices that signal relations between ideas. Connective knowledge varies widely across grades and is known to support reading comprehension and school writing. Despite the important role that connective knowledge plays in reading and writing, few resources exist to support teachers in understanding which connectives to prioritize in Spanish literacy instruction. In this study we combined a secondary analysis of midadolescents’ connective assessment data (810 students in grades 4–8) with a corpus linguistics frequency analysis of connectives in Chilean national science and social studies textbooks (1,079,593 total words), with the goal of generating a pedagogically relevant tool to support the instruction of connectives in Spanish literacy across content areas. To generate the Connective Frequency Bands Tool, we first examined the role of grade and connective type in midadolescents’ connective knowledge. Secondly, we examined associations between students’ knowledge and textual frequencies across content areas for each connective included in the assessment. Finally, informed by midadolescents’ connective knowledge and by the corpus linguistics analysis of science and social studies textbooks from grades 1–8, we generated the Connective Frequency Bands Tool listing connectives frequencies by grade, connective type, and content area.

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The secret life of connectives: a taxonomy to study individual differences in mid-adolescents’ use of connectives in writing to persuade

Cited by 3 publications

References 48 publications

The Language Demands of Analytical Reading and Writing at School

The Language Demands of Analytical Reading and Writing at School

What Is Important to Measure in Sentence-Level Language Comprehension?

Connective Frequency Bands informed by textbook frequencies and midadolescents’ knowledge of connectives: a tool to support Spanish literacy instruction across content areas

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