Learning to write is an important process of children’s literacy acquisition, but few studies used longitudinal designs to clarify the changes in various influencing factors on children's writing development. Therefore, this longitudinal study was to describe the changes in writing quality and the interplay among variables, and further examined the patterns of growth differences among writing development groups. Participants were 133 Taiwanese children, who took standardized tests including oral language expression, transcription, sentence construction, vocabulary size and writing performance at Grade 1 and 2. Results showed children's scores in writing production, different words, sentence complexity improved, and vocabulary size and transcription skills also increased significantly from Grade 1 to 2. However, language expression and sentence construction scores remained stable. Discriminant Analysis identified four developmental groups as good starters, explorers, slow writers, and struggling writers. ANOVA indicated good starters and explorers wrote more complex sentences with correct syntax structure than struggling and slow writers. Interestingly, there were no differences in the number of incorrect complex sentences among groups, suggesting good starters and explorers were willing to experiment with written expression and not afraid of making mistakes. Strugglers significantly suffered from the limited vocabulary size and lexical diversity. Notably, no significant differences emerged in oral language expression scores among the four groups. The correlations between oral expression and writing quality declined from Grade 1 to Grade 2. The findings may contribute to early writing instruction and discussion of developmental interplay between spoken and written language development.

Authors:
Yun-Hsia Liang, University of Taipei, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Yun-Hsia Liang is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at University of Taipei in Taiwan

See this presentation on the full schedule – Sunday Schedule

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