Abstract
Text generation—the mental translation of ideas into language at word, sentence, and discourse levels—involves oral language abilities. However, oral language skills are rarely a target of writing interventions. We ran an intervention to improve fifth and 10th graders’ written production through the development of oral sentence generation (grammatical and syntactic) skills. One hundred and fifteen students—68 fifth graders (four classrooms) and 47 tenth graders (four classrooms)—participated in a stepped-wedge cluster-randomized controlled trial. Two fifth-grade classrooms (n = 35) and two 10th-grade classrooms (n = 20) received nine 90-min sessions (3 weeks, three sessions a week) of oral language intervention immediately after the pretest (experimental groups); the two other fifth- (n = 33) and 10th-grade classrooms (n = 27) received business-as-usual writing instruction and received a delayed oral language intervention after the posttest (waiting list group). The intervention consisted of team-based games to improve oral sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills. We assessed written sentence generation, written sentence reformulation, written text quality (macrostructure and language), and text writing fluency before (pretest) and after (posttest) the intervention and 5 weeks after the intervention (follow-up). The results showed that training on oral sentence generation skills can lead to significant gains in both sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills and text macrostructural quality. Improvement at the sentence level was, however, significant only for the younger writers (fifth graders).
Highlights
Text generation—the process of encoding ideas into language for writing at word, sentence, and discourse levels—involves oral language, as writers use their oral vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to generate words and sentences for their texts (Abbott & Berninger, 1993; Babayigit & Stainthorp, 2010)
In contrast to the not-so-simple view of writing, the DIEW model of writing (Kim & Schatschneider, 2017) considers oral language skills to be a direct influence on written composition from the beginning of formal writing instruction, proposing that transcription skills and oral discourse-level skills have a strong and direct effect on written production beginning in Grade 1
We aimed to explore the effectiveness of a nine-session, classroom-level oral language intervention focused on the oral sentence generation skills of students in Grades 5 and 10
Summary
Text generation—the process of encoding ideas into language for writing at word, sentence, and discourse levels—involves oral language, as writers use their oral vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to generate words and sentences for their texts (Abbott & Berninger, 1993; Babayigit & Stainthorp, 2010). Research conducted with English-speaking beginning writers has suggested that developmental models of writing might have underestimated the role of oral language skills in early written composition (e.g., Kent, Wanzek, Petscher, Al Otaiba, & Kim, 2014; Kim, Al Otaiba, Wanzek, & Gatlin, 2015). This has led to the development of the direct and indirect effects model of writing (DIEW, Kim, 2016; Kim & Schatschneider, 2017). To the not-so-simple view of writing, the DIEW model of writing has been validated by empirical evidence of early effects of oral discourse-level language skills on writing (Kim, 2019; Kim & Schatschneider, 2017), which has been observed in older writers as well (fourth graders; Kim, 2019)
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