1 L1 writing development and the criteria to assess it: insights

L1 writing development and the criteria to assess it:
insights from a Portuguese pilot project1
Carlos A. M. Gouveia
University of Lisbon & Institute for Theoretical
and Computational Linguistics, Portugal
1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it intends to present some results of a pilot
project on L1 writing development in the 4th, 6th, and 9th school years in Portugal, which aimed to
discover indicators for growth in writing development throughout those years. Secondly, it intends
to launch a discussion on the need to establish clear and empirically informed criteria for the
assessment of writing, thus looking forward to providing L1 teachers with the necessary
instruments to assess their students' texts.
The pilot scheme was designed to foster a larger project, involving a corpus of 1200 texts,
now being undertaken by a team of researchers at the University of Lisbon and the Institute for
Theoretical and Computational Linguistics, under the auspices of the Portuguese Ministry of
Education, and whose results are expected to appear throughout 2010 and 2011. Ninety texts written
by students from the three years under scrutiny (thirty for each school year) were analysed and
described within the pilot project. The texts were written as the result of text production tasks
included in the national examinations for each of the school years involved and were all authored by
students assessed with the highest marks both in their exams and in this specific text production
task.
The texts were analysed first for lexical density, grammatical intricacy and interdependency
relations between clauses in clause complexes, and later for structures of modification in groups and
clause complexes, grammatical metaphor and thematic development. Although I cannot here go
through all the stages covered in the analysis, due to space constraints and the twofold purpose of
1 Different draft versions of this paper were presented at the 20th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference
and Workshop, University of Helsinki, Finland, 11th-13th June, 2008, and at the 4th Conference of the Latin America
System-Functional Linguistics Association, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil, 29th
September-3rd October, 2008. I am grateful to both audiences for their questions and remarks. I also wish to thank
Mafalda Mendes, Lachlan Mackenzie and Alzira Tavares for reading and commenting on drafts of this paper.
1
the paper, I will try to account for some of the overall trends in the results, and then discuss some
issues related to writing development and assessment.
2. The main findings
Let me start with aspects related to lexical density. There is almost no difference between the
results of year 4 students and year 6 students concerning lexical density - “the number of lexical
items as a ratio of the number of clauses” (Halliday 1989: 67): the average ratio for year 4 students
is 1.9 and for year 6 is 2.1. The same cannot be said, though, about the difference between the
results of year 6 students and year 9 students, as they show a clear difference of 1.6 (a ratio of 2.1
for year 6 texts against a ratio of 3.7 for year 9 texts). It is not only a fact that year 9 students write
longer texts (and in this case that difference is not the result of any task specification), it is also a
fact that their texts are denser than the texts by year 6 students.
The proximity of year 4 and year 6 texts in terms of lexical density may be explained by the
fact that the genres of both texts are quite similar, since both are dialogues. The Year 4 text is
intended as the continuation of a scene from a theatre play (cf. Continua agora tu o diálogo entre a
Ana e o anão. Imagina, no teu texto, o que eles podem ter dito um ao outro./ “Now you will
continue the dialogue between Ana and the dwarf. Imagine, in your text, what they may have said to
each other.”), whereas the year 6 text, although intended as a narrative, turns out to include dialogue
as its predominant constitutive part (cf. Um dia, o velho do realejo e Catarina voltaram a
encontrar-se. Narra esse encontro, referindo quando e onde se encontraram. Inclui no teu texto o
diálogo entre ambos./ “One day the old music box man and Catarina met again. Tell the story of
that meeting stating when and where they met. Include in your text the dialogue they had.”).
Furthermore, as the production of dialogue (written language imitating spoken language) fosters the
use of shorter sentences containing simple clauses, it is normal for both year 4 and year 6 texts to
have a lower lexical density if compared with year 9 texts, since year 9 texts do not comprise
dialogue as a requirement. In fact, the task for year 9 students was a rather open one, admitting
different kinds of texts, including texts encompassing some dialogue:
O vagabundo de que fala o Texto A era uma pessoa diferente. Também tu,
certamente, conheces pessoas que se afastam dos padrões comuns, que, no seu aspecto e
modo de ser ou de agir, marcam a diferença e, por isso, se tornam figuras especiais ou
mesmo inesquecíveis.
Traça o perfil de uma dessas pessoas e relata como a conheceste, o que nela te
impressiona ou por que razão ficaste a admirá-la.
“The vagrant that is the subject of text A was someone different. You too, for sure,
2
know people that do not fit into the common standards, people that in their appearance
and way of being or acting stand out as different and, therefore, become special or even
unforgettable characters.
Write a sketch of one of those people and recount how you came to know her/him,
what there is in her/him that impresses you and what was the reason why you came to
admire her/him.”
Some texts by year 9 students (about 20%) do in fact incorporate some kind of dialogue into
their structure, but in general they tend to be recounts with no dialogue. Even so, the difference
between year 6 and year 9 students' texts in terms of lexical density should not and cannot be
explained solely on the basis of the presence or absence of dialogue in the texts, since the higher
lexical density of year 9 texts is also connected to grammatical intricacy.
As Robert de Beaugrande put it back in 1984, “External differences at various age levels
should figure in education only if we can explain the relevance of the observed or rehearsed
behavior to cognitive and social advancement” (Beaugrande 1984). In making this comment de
Beaugrande was actually criticising what in his own terms was a theoretical justification that was by
no means obvious: that intensive practice by younger students of writing skills associated with the
writing of older and more mature students produces younger and more mature students. Although
correct from the standpoint of his own personal perspective on the subject and the critique he was
directing at mentalist linguistics and Chomskyan transformational grammar, de Beaugrande's
assertion nevertheless misses one particular important point: that there are external differences at
various age levels when it comes to writing development and that those differences should be well
studied and described.
For instance, despite de Beaugrande's criticism of his work, Hunt (1965: 141) actually
showed and Schleppegrell (2004: 79) further stressed that older students can successfully
consolidate a large number of simple clauses into a single clause complex, as they grow older in
terms of writing development. The strategies they use, apart from mastering the use of connectors to
connect clauses in hypotactic and paratactic structures, include reducing clauses to groups or single
words, as happens in nominalization. In fact, according to Schleppegrell (2004: 78), “Research on
children's writing development from a grammatical perspective has focused on the movement from
chained, coordinated clause structure to the more condensed clausal structure typical of more
mature writing. In this process, children first use only coordination, but then begin to incorporate
dependent clauses, vary their sentence structure, and expand their vocabulary”.
This is also what we have found in our research, when it comes to grammatical intricacy.
Year 9 texts tend to have not only more clauses per clause complex but also more embedded
clauses, showing a clear mastery of both taxis and logico-semantic relations and of modifying
structures as in the following examples:
3
Porém, repentinamente, o sujeito que estava a comprar o bilhete olha para trás e
aumentando o tom de voz para ser ouvido, diz:
- A menina aí do fundo, deseja comprar bilhete para onde? (910)2
“But, suddenly, the man who was buying the ticket looks back and, raising his voice so as
to be heard, says:
- You, the young lady at the back, where do you wish to buy a ticket to?”
Na sociedade em geral a maioria das pessoas se veste e age segundo o meio onde
vive, mas é certo dizer que há pessoas que no meio de tantas outras se destacam, não por
serem piores ou melhores, mas apenas por serem diferentes. (913)
“In society in general the majority of people dress and act according to the
environment they live in, but it is correct to say that there are people who in the middle of
so many other ones single themselves out, not because they are the worst or the best, but
only because they are different.”
Complex embedded structures such as que no meio de tantas outras se destacam, não por
serem piores ou melhores, mas apenas por serem diferentes/ “who in the middle of so many other
ones single themselves out, not because they are the worst or the best, but only because they are
different”, can only be found in year 9 texts and not in years 4 and 6 texts, where these structures
tend to be simpler, like que habitavam naquela linda terra/ “that lived in that beautiful land” in A
Ana foi apresentada a todos os seres fantásticos que habitavam naquela linda terra (421)/ “Ana
was introduced to all the fantastic beings that lived in that beautiful land”.
The same can be said of the use of grammatical metaphor, evident in year 9 texts, as in o
crescimento da nossa relação (911)/ “the growth of our relationship”, a progressão escolar (911)/
“school progression” or a evolução da sociedade (922)/ “the evolution of society”, but absent from
year 4 and 6 texts, although with notable exceptions such as the one at the beginning of this textual
excerpt from a year 6 student:
Dez anos após a despedida do velho solitário, já estava Catarina empregada,
encontraram-se de novo, no Hospital. Catarina era uma médica muito conhecida por
aquelas bandas. O velho tinha partido um braço e tinha ido para o Hospital. Que
coincidência tão grande, foi tratado por Catarina. - A sua cara não me é estranha – disse o
velho. - A sua também não – ripostou Catarina. (602)
“Ten years after Catarina's farewell to the solitary old man, Catarina being
already employed, they met again, at the hospital. Catarina was a well known physician
around there. The old man had broken his arm and had gone to the hospital. What a great
coincidence, he was seen to by Catarina. “Your face looks familiar”, the old man said.
“Yours too”, Catarina answered back.”
Consciously or otherwise, this student has used some quite sophisticated devices, like the use
2 The numbers in brackets refer to the text from which the sample was taken: the first digit refers to the school year, the
second and third digits to the actual text among the thirty texts from that school year.
4
of an unusual prepositional group containing a circumstance of time instead of a more common
temporal enhancing hypotactic clause (Dez anos depois de se ter despedido do velho solitário/ “Ten
years after bidding farewell to the solitary old man”), the inversion of Subject and Predicator (the
uncommon já estava Catarina empregada/ “Catarina being already employed” in contrast with the
more common Já Catarina estava empregada/ *“Catarina already being employed”), the symmetric
structure of the short exchange between the two characters, and the perfect conjunction of the
exclamatory clause with the declarative in Que coincidência tão grande, foi tratado por Catarina/
“What a great coincidence, he was seen to by Catarina”.
If we take into account the use of adverbs one can notice a huge difference between the three
grades, with year 6 students using twice as many adverbs as year 4, and year 9 students using three
times more than year 6 students. This is due to an expansion in the use of circumstance types,
particularly of manner, through the use of not only lexical adverbs but also prepositional phrases,
such as é com este professor que vivo cada aula, como um episódio da minha vida (912)/ “it is with
this teacher that I live each class like an episode in my life”. From the use of adverbs of intensity,
time and place, quite common in years 4 and 6, we are now in year 9 definitely in the world of
certainty, manner and expression of opinion (Modal and Comment Adjuncts):
É um homem relativamente inteligente e sofisticado, para a posição que tem. (922)/ “He
is a relatively intelligent and sophisticated man for his position.”
Infelizmente, ela não é Deus, é humana... (917)/ “Unfortunately, she is not God, she is
human...”
Curiosamente, eu também conheço alguém assim. (916)/ “Curiously, I too know
someone like that.”
3. Writing development
Even without a comprehensive demonstration of research results, I think it has become
evident in the preceding presentation that it is possible to establish clusters of lexicogrammatical
characteristics associated with the texts produced by the students of each school year considered,
thus opening up possibilities for a fully data-driven characterization of lexicogrammatical structures
and the discourse semantics of written texts in primary and intermediate school years.
The characteristics are there and they are open to description. We just have to keep in mind
in our description that expressions such as “mature writing” or “mature style” are in fact loaded
expressions leading us possibly to wrong conclusions. It is not only that different characteristics
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may be associated with different genres; they can also be associated with different types of writers.
Those differences may lead the researcher to value certain characteristics that another researcher
may not value as much as she values a different one (for instance, the use of dependent clauses vs.
the use of free modifiers or Adjuncts).
In relation to the first aspect, genre characteristics, one as only to consider, for instance,
Frances Christie’s words on general characteristics associated with different genres (2005: 168):
The narrative, while also exploiting noun groups successfully, as well as other resources,
nonetheless does not use nominalisation. On the other hand, it provides interesting
evidence of what a successful writer can achieve in terms of expressing attitudinal and
emotional response to events. The discussion genre, an important text type in which
children learn to develop and express opinion with a view to persuading their readers,
makes use of modality, among other matters, to build opinion and judgments. Control of
modality in writing, it would seem, is largely a development of the upper primary years,
though it can occasionally appear earlier.
In relation to the second aspect, on styles and “types of writers”, de Beaugrande puts it rather
sharply but in a precise way, when he says that “Syntactic proportions do not make Ernest
Hemingway less “mature” than Edward Gibbon (...). Short, simple sentences can be the sign of the
mature “tough talker,” while the immature “sweet talker” and the dehumanized “stuffy talker” tend
toward long, complex ones (...). All these considerations, [sic] suggest that the usual tabulations do
not equal maturity.”
As awkward and inconvenient for teachers as it may seem, there is no available description
of the regularities and/or exceptions in terms of text production in Portuguese in school years 1 to 9
(or for any other year, for that matter). It seems normal to expect students in year 9 to be both more
aware of language and more confident of their writing skills than students in year 4, for instance.
And if this is true, then it will also be true that between year 4 and year 9 some sort of
developmental progression will occur. What are the assessment criteria, in terms of positive
achievement, that one has for evaluating this developmental progression? This is something that has
not been established despite the importance of writing and the structural aspects of text production
in L1 learning programmes and syllabi in Portugal. Teachers teach students what the learning
programmes and textbooks tell them the students need to know, but they are, we all are, relatively
uninformed about students’ writing knowledge, both linguistically and metalinguistically.
Therefore, it is important to gain insights into what students know about writing and how they write
at each developmental stage, so that we can actually assess writing with some valid criteria. And
these criteria must reflect the developmental progression of students throughout the different years.
It is not that the development of the writing process is a serial or linear progression, whereby the
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students move from one stage to the other, one after the other; it is only that the knowledge of
writing is cumulative and connected with a metacognitive awareness of the process as both a
technology and a technique, an instrument for effective communication. As Lin, Monroe & Troia
(2007: 226), stress “the development of writing knowledge is convoluted but follows a general
pattern. This pattern slowly moves from a self-centered, local focus toward a more global,
audience-oriented, self-aware, and self-regulated focus.”
Linguistic research must feed into teacher training programmes and assessment practices in
such ways that the relationship between language and experience and questions about learning
comes to be more evident (Halliday 1982) for both teachers and students. Language does serve the
construal of experience through meaning, and teachers and students alike will profit if they become
aware of the resources for structuring experience within and between clauses and in discourse
semantics. Teaching practices supported by descriptions of writing development as ontogenetic
development will help the contextualisation of these resources in patterns of discourse across
different genres. An analysis of the assessment criteria teachers were given to assess the texts in this
pilot project, for instance, shows that a lot has yet to be done when it comes to linguistic
descriptions of writing development.
4. Assessment of writing
Since they were produced as part of the national examinations for the school years involved,
the texts were also assessed according to specific guidelines and criteria produced by the national
educational authorities, e.g. the Ministry of Education. The system works upon the principle of
having a specific number of teachers (used to teach those school years) mark the exams. For that the
Ministry produces general guidelines to be followed by all the teachers involved in the marking
process and sets of criteria to be used for the assessment of each of the tasks that are part of the
exams.
Following this policy, years 4 and 6 texts were assessed on the basis of eight pre-established
criteria, each divided into five different levels of achievement (marks 0 to 4): Extension, Theme and
Typology, Coherence and Content Information/ Appropriateness, Structure and (Discursive)
Cohesion, Syntax, Vocabulary, Punctuation, and Spelling. For each criterion three of the five levels
of achievement (marks 4, 2 and 0) were the object of a full description in terms of expected
outcomes on the part of the students. The intermediate levels (marks 1 and 3) had no descriptors,
based on the principle (which I assume) that in a cline of 5 levels of achievement one does not need
specific descriptors for all of them. The result was thus something like the example in Table 1:
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Levels of achievement
Criteria
4
3
2
1
0
Extension
description
description
description
Theme and Typology
description
description
description
Coherence and
Content Information
description
description
description
Etc.
description
description
description
Table 1
Distribution of criteria, levels of achievement and descriptors
Year 9 texts were assessed on the basis of not eight but six criteria: Punctuation became part
of Structure and Cohesion, and Extension was discarded3.
When one goes through the descriptions one can see that there is a difference in the
descriptors used for each level of achievement, actually showing some scaling in students’
knowledge of writing. The problem with these assessment criteria is that, in general, they are not
only the same for years 4, 6 and 9 (which in itself is not a problem), but they also have the same
scales and descriptors for years 4, 6 and 9. The only criteria where one can actually detect
differences between what is assessed in each school year are Extension (that is, the number of
words), Theme and Typology, and Coherence and Content Appropriateness, the ones that have to do
with generic and registerial aspects of text production4. The descriptors used for each level of
achievement in the remaining five criteria are almost entirely the same for the three school years. As
an example of what I am saying, let us look at the intermediate descriptors for the criteria Syntax
and Vocabulary (differences, where they exist, are shown in yellow):
Year 4
Syntax Manifesta domínio
Year 6
Year 9
Manifesta domínio aceitável Manifesta um domínio
3 Another difference was that for year 4 the third and fourth criteria were registered as Coherence and Content
Information, and Structure and Cohesion; for year 6 as Coherence and Content Appropriateness, and Structure and
Discursive Cohesion; and for year 9 as Coherence and Content Appropriateness, and Structure and Cohesion.
4 In systemic functional linguistics, genre and register are the two main concepts that deal with the functional variation
of texts. Connected with the context of culture, genre shows how texts are similar and how they share some
characteristics, such as the ones associated with the realization of their purpose, their social and interactive dimension
and their stages of meaning. Register, on the other hand, is connected with the context of situation and shows how
texts are different as a result of contextual motivations such as the ones associated with the linguistic expression of
content (field), of interpersonal relations (tenor) and of textualization principles (mode). For a description of the two
notions, see Eggins & Martin (1997).
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aceitável das regras de
funcionamento da língua no
plano intrafrásico,
apresentando erros / falhas
não sistemáticos, sem
conduzir a mal-entendidos.
das regras de
funcionamento da língua no
plano intrafrásico,
apresentando erros / falhas
não sistemáticos, sem
conduzir a mal-entendidos.
aceitável das estruturas
sintácticas mais comuns da
língua, apresentando
pequenos erros / falhas não
sistemáticos, sem conduzir a
mal-entendidos.
“Shows acceptable control
of the language rules at the
intra sentential level,
producing incidental
errors/mistakes without
leading to
misunderstandings.”
“Shows acceptable control
of the language rules at the
intra sentential level,
producing incidental
errors/mistakes without
leading to
misunderstandings.”
“Shows an acceptable
control of the more common
syntactic structures of the
language, producing minor
incidental errors/mistakes
without leading to
misunderstandings.”
Utiliza vocabulário ajustado
ao conteúdo, mas pouco
variado e um tanto
convencional,
eventualmente com
confusões pontuais que, no
entanto, não perturbam a
comunicação.
Utiliza vocabulário ajustado
ao conteúdo, mas pouco
variado e um tanto
convencional,
eventualmente com
confusões pontuais que, no
entanto, não perturbam a
comunicação.
“Uses vocabulary
appropriate for the content,
but somewhat conventional
and with little variation, and
possibly with occasional
confusions, which
nevertheless do not disturb
communication.”
“Uses vocabulary
appropriate for the content,
but somewhat conventional
and with little variation, and
possibly with occasional
confusions, which
nevertheless do not disturb
communication.”
Vocabu Utiliza vocabulário
lary
ajustado ao conteúdo, mas
pouco variado,
eventualmente com
confusões pontuais que, no
entanto, não perturbam a
comunicação.
“Uses vocabulary
appropriate for the content,
but with little variation, and
possibly with occasional
confusions, which
nevertheless do not disturb
communication.”
Table 2
Descriptors of intermediate levels of achievement for the criteria Syntax and Vocabulary
What one can read in these descriptors when seen in comparison for each school year is the
same as can be found in the remaining descriptors and also in the remaining criteria: the scales do
not seem to show any developmental and formative principle, and assessment criteria descriptors
are basically the same for each of the three different school years. This does not mean that the
professionals working at the Ministry of Education are not aware of the developmental and
formative principle such scales must have, but rather that they lack the instruments that would help
them showing that principle in the scales. In fact, one must bear in mind that for clear perspectives
on the ontogenetic development of writing to be introduced into assessment practices throughout
the Portuguese educational system, a linguistic description of the ontogeny of writing must exist
beforehand.
Despite this deficit in the attention paid by Portuguese linguists to aspects of the ontogenetic
development of writing and despite the lack of consistent direction and control in the
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implementation of clear assessment criteria and of productive practices, it will never be superfluous
to stress that the development of writing does in fact follow a general pattern. And this is true of
writing knowledge as a metalinguistic phenomenon, but also of writing as a practice, a social
practice. As a social practice, writing starts as a particular skill, a mastery not of content or of
expression, but of the use of the instruments and the medium, which requires a skilfulness and
proficiency that the growing child has to learn from the beginning. It is not only a matter of
mastering handwriting, orthography and graphology, it is also a question of the child going through
the process of controlling the pen and the piece of paper, which in itself may be a tremendously
difficult adventure. And when the child is already learning to produce texts, express ideas and use
punctuation, s/he is not yet fully in control of those instruments and the medium. Again it is not
only the case that “as they are mastered and put into practice by the growing child, [the writing
systems] take on a life of their own, reaching directly into the wording of the language rather than
accessing the wording via the sound”, as Halliday (2004: 7) puts it; it is also the case of the
individual child having to master the technology, of having to conquer some social space and
importance before becoming proficient in this particular medium for the expression of language.
The “self-centered, local focus” referred to by Lin, Monroe & Troia (2007: 226), typical of
the earlier stages in the development of writing, is therefore first and foremost socially motivated in
its self-centred orientation. The child's struggle through the process of learning how to write is a
fundamental socialization process, as it is part of the process of acquiring control over the physical
world; and the child not only is aware of that process, s/he is showing it proudly to others. As
control of the technology becomes more evident and the child becomes more confident, along
comes control of the technique. This happens through grades 1 to 4, as the child becomes a more
experienced writer fully aware of writing as a means of communicating with an audience.
From what I have said so far it seems natural to assert that what the child is capable of doing
at the end of this developmental stage (grade 4) is therefore different from what they will be able to
do at the end of grade 6, and later on at the end of grade 9. From the learning and the practice of
writing as a technology via the learning and the practice of writing as a technique, the child
gradually comes to learn and practice writing as a purposeful task.
These developments can also be seen in the students’ relationship with the specific writing
task they were called to perform in terms of text extension. As I have already mentioned, year 9
students have written longer texts, but the writing tasks for the three grades were, strangely enough,
quite similar in terms of extension requirements: between 150 and 250 words for grade 4, between
200 and 250 words for grade 6 and between 140 and 240 words for grade 9. The number of words
actually produced on average by the students from each of these school years was different, as we
can see in Table 3, which further stresses that year 4 students, and to some extent year 6 students,
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are still struggling with the writing process, the technique, whereas year 9 students seem to be more
confident with their control of the medium and the technique.
Number of words requested Average number of
in task instructions
words produced
Year 4 15-25 lines (=150-250 words)
163
Year 6 20-25 lines (=200-250 words)
202
Year 9
140-240 words
233
Table 3
Number of words requested and number of words produced
5. Conclusions
At this moment, I think it has become obvious that the description of some developmental
stages in student writing development during basic school and the application of formative aspects
of assessment as a possible approach to writing development may be seen as two complementary
trends. As Keen (2005: 240-241) puts it, we must use “assessment criteria to support students’
writing as well as for feedback, in identifying strengths, achievements and areas for development in
students’ writing and conveying these to students, and in using assessment information to inform
continuing writing development.”
The work developed under this pilot project has clearly shown, for instance, that we have to
provide students with carefully worded task specifications if we want them to respond successfully
to a writing challenge; therefore, if we ask students to narrate how two friends reunite after several
years and specifically ask them to include in their texts “the dialogue they had”, that request has to
be purposeful and its pertinence must be considered in the assessment criteria for that task. The fact
that this was not the case with the text production task in the national exams for year 6 is just an
example of a rather common mismatch between what teachers ask students to do in terms of writing
and the criteria for assessing the results of those requests, as the latter are sometimes non-existent.
Of course, one can always assess these activities by considering whether or not the result meets
what has been required in terms of genre, that is, whether the student is aware of the target texts and
discourses and actively produces them when requested to. That is not what I am pleading for here,
though. What I am arguing for is neither specifically generic nor registerial, it is specifically
lexicogrammatical. It is something along the lines of what has been stressed in reports produced by
the EPPI Review Group for English, a group acting as part of the initiative on evidence-informed
policy and practice at the EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education,
University of London, and funded by the United Kingdom Department for Education and Skills
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(DfES). Based on different reports on The effect of grammar teaching in English on 5 to 16 year
olds’ accuracy and quality in written composition (Andrews et al. 2004a and 2004b), the group
clearly stresses that present materials designed to help students to write need to be reviewed
(Andrews et al. 2007: 3): “There needs to be a review of the overall effectiveness of present
materials designed to help young people to write; not all the practical suggestions put forward will
be effective, and the emphasis on knowledge about language and language awareness, although
useful and interesting in itself, may not be helping students to improve their writing skills.”
It is not only the fact that according to these reports knowledge about language and language
awareness may not be effective in improving writing skills. It is also a truth that “the teaching of
formal grammar (and its derivatives) is ineffective” within the same process (ibidem). On the
contrary, and according to the same reports, “the teaching of sentence combining is one (of
probably a number of) method(s) that is effective”.
In conclusion, we need to put the findings of our linguistic research into a theory of writing
development, something we have not built so far, so that we may reach a much better
lexicogrammatical description of what students can attain at each developmental writing stage and
get more opportunities for a formative assessment of their use of lexicogrammar in writing.
References
Andrews, R., C. Torgerson, S. Beverton, A. Freeman, T. Locke, G. Low, A. Robinson and D. Zhu.
Review: The Effect of Grammar Teaching (sentence combining) in English on 5 to 16 year
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