Abstract
Abstract An essential prerequisite for a fully developed writing ability is the effortless mastery of lower-level writing skills. These include, in particular, writing fluency, since fluent writing frees up sufficient cognitive capacity for other demanding higher-order processes of text production, such as planning and revising a text or tailoring it to a particular audience. Despite its relevance, writing fluency – in contrast to reading fluency – has so far only played a minor role in both writing research and classroom practice. This article first defines the construct of writing fluency and then elaborates on its two components: transcription fluency and text generation fluency. While transcription fluency is fairly well defined in the existing literature, text generation fluency remains underspecified, particularly from a linguistic point of view. How ideas are fluently translated into language is not sufficiently addressed by cognitive models of writing processes. It remains unclear which linguistic knowledge is most relevant for writing processes; what is known is that part of it is knowledge of genre-specific text patterns. Within the framework of an explorative empirical study, the influence of different text genres on the text generation fluency of primary school students was investigated to shed more light on this component. We found that text genre has an influence on text generation fluency, in particular in more competent writers, whereas there appears to be no such influence in weaker writers. The latter can be explained by the fact that in texts of weaker writers, the content appears to have been written more associatively and that there are hardly any genre-specific patterns and linguistic elements irrespective of the text genre they were asked to produce.
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