Syntactic features of written discourse at early primary school age - a longitudinal approach

Abstract

By the acquisition of written language form during the first years of schooling, the child starts to move away from the elementary structures by including new, more complex constructions into the existing base. The aim of this paper is to study the ability of producing different clause types in the texts of first- and fourth-grade primary school students, i.e. to study the existing differences in the syntactic structures of texts between the older and younger students. The initial research as well as the repeated measuring after three years included forty-two students of one primary school from Belgrade. Since in both the first and the second cycle of the study each child composed three texts, the corpus consisted of 252 texts. The analysis of the obtained material was performed using the SPSS software package. The results provide an insight into the average length of texts and sentences produced by first-grade and fourth-grade students. The longer the duration of schooling, the lower the number of simple clauses (both basic and extended), as well as coordinate clauses, while the number of constructions with subordinate clauses is increasing. This finding confirms the fact that early primary school age children are expanding their syntactic competence, i.e. that their later language development continues in the school period. This can be helpful for teachers in the process of literacy acquisition and in developing the strategies that facilitate reaching the higher levels of competence in written discourse and evolving of children?s syntax towards the writing patterns of adult speakers.