Top-down Measures in 7th Grade Writing: The Effects of Genre and SES

Abstract

The study reported here analyzed Hebrew texts written by 37 7th graders from middle-high SES and 28 7th graders from a low-SES background in order to determine their abilities in writing personal-experience narratives and expository texts on the theme of success and failure. Measures, designed to be age-appropriate as well as genre- and theme-sensitive, related to four textual properties: text size, text content, text structure, and text cohesion. Our findings indicate that Israeli 7th graders of both SES backgrounds are able to produce appropriate personal-experience narratives in terms of text quality and structure. While expositions have not yet caught up with narrative abilities in terms of content quality and conceptual density in this age group, they host richer, denser linguistic expression and their structure predicts good narrative content. The ability to produce a well-proportioned expository was found to predict narrative content. However, 7th graders from low SES background were found to lag behind their high SES peers in gaining command of expository text production. Specifically, better text proportions were found to predict text quality more in high SES than in low SES texts, while better demarcation in one genre predicted better content in the other genre, but only in the high-SES texts. These findings call for special focus on expository reading and writing in educational programs targeting students from deprived backgrounds.