Word choice for writing: the nature and types of children’s meta-lexical awareness

Abstract

Children’s increasing expertise in composition relies partly on word choice. Little is known about how children consider words as they write, their meta-lexical awareness, or about their choice of words for writing. In this study, we investigate children’s meta-lexical awareness, as one aspect of their metalinguistic awareness, which guides their word choices as they write. We describe how child writers express their meta-lexical awareness and how this might relate to writing achievement. We view language as functional in context of use following systemic, functional grammar theorists. We employ a mixed methods approach using writing achievement scores and a modified think aloud protocol to understand what children think about words as they write. Findings show that children develop increasing sophistication in the way they consider and choose words and that this relates to their writing achievement. The nature of children’s meta-lexical awareness and its relationship to writing achievement is theorised, adding to the growing body of research into the importance of metalinguistic awareness to children’s writing.

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“…More precisely, lexical awareness is the ability to manipulate different aspects of lexical competence, with the latter including vocabulary size and lexical organisation. It proves useful in word selection, especially for writing purposes (Newton et al, 2023). Most importantly, lexical awareness also involves polysemous word learning, a crucial aspect in language acquisition as learners need to recognise multiple meanings of words and develop their cognitive and metacognitive knowledge of lexicon (Stahl and Nagy, 2006).…”