Developing textual competence

Abstract

Children’s mastery of linguistic resources for achieving textual competence is crucial to writing development. There is, however, a relative scarcity of empirical evidence regarding how writing develops during the primary years of schooling. This chapter contributes to understanding the development of writing capacity, focusing on the linguistic resources primary children use to make meaning in two widely used text types – Information Reports and Expositions. Of particular interest in this chapter is the way the noun group structures are used to make meaning appropriate to the text types. This research draws on findings from a larger study that examined, within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the texts of primary aged children (in Australia, Years 3 to 6, inclusive). The chapter contributes to an enriched understanding of an expansion of the noun group as a marker of development in textual competence. The analysis sheds light on how teachers and educators may craft developmental pathways to facilitate student textual competence, particularly in the two genres investigated.