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Teaching linguistic aspects relevant to text construction is an essential component of any thorough writing instruction program, despite the conflicting evidence regarding its effectiveness. In this study, 889 second- and fourth-grade students were assigned to one of three conditions: Self-Regulated Development (SRSD), SRSD-connectors (SRSD-C), and business-as-usual (BAU). The experimental conditions addressed planning and self-regulation strategies to write opinion essays, but only the SRSD condition included explicit teaching of connectors (e.g., because) and discourse markers (e.g., In conclusion). Children in both experimental conditions outscored children in the BAU condition across grades and outcome variables. In addition, the SRSD condition showed larger effect sizes on Grade 2 children's gains in text quality, number of genre-appropriate elements, and number of connectors than the SRSD-C condition. The study provides evidence of the effectiveness of explicitly teaching functionally motivated linguistic representations within a SRSD program. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing difficulties have typically been investigated as the consequence of learning disabilities. However, several characteristics of texts and the underlying cognitive skills are often shared across these populations. Our aim was to investigate the writing and cognitive profile of children at risk of writing difficulties, regardless of whether they have concomitant diagnoses. Drawing from a sample of 357 primary school children, we identified children who showed low levels on a single writing component, such as handwriting (15), spelling (39) or text generation (17), and 11 children who showed difficulties across two or more components. We compared them to a typically developing group (50) on a series of writing features (e.g., spelling, vocabulary) and cognitive and linguistic skills (e.g., working memory, morphosyntax). Children who struggled with a single writing component showed difficulties also in other components. Children with multiple writing difficulties struggled with most writing features. All children displayed similar levels in key cognitive and linguistic skills. Our data thus present compelling evidence of children who struggle with writing, despite no obvious cognitive or linguistic impairments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language by assessing a series of text-based features in children's texts between mid-Grade 1 to mid-Grade 2. Results revealed that two constructs, writing conventions and productivity, emerged in both languages, but the influence of orthographic consistency started to be evident in the later time points. Other constructs of text generation seemed to emerge later and were less stable over time. The article thus highlights the language-general underpinnings of early text-writing development and the impact of orthographic consistency; furthermore, it strengthens the view that some writing components develop before others. We discuss implications for the assessment of early written products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the implementation of a set of classroom activities aimed at homogenizing participants' pedagogical input while raising their awareness of analytical texts' main functions. Two hundred and twelve Spanish speakers from primary, secondary and university levels participate in the study, each producing two analytical texts. The corpus consists of 424 texts produced on the same topic. Results indicate that not all the features pertaining to the same domain show identical changes across educational levels or are identically sensitive to pedagogical work. Productivity measures increase with educational level and after pedagogical work, except for university students. Most lexical, syntactic and discourse-level measures improve with educational level, though their sensitivity to pedagogical work is not straightforward. Findings suggest the need to evaluate writing quality at a high level of granularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of computerized statistical packages allows us to plug in our data and to expect a set of estimates, which we can communicate in our final research report. However, statistical software is not an end; it is only the means. Our responsibility as researchers is to develop a set of arguments that explain why our final methodological choice is the better one, which will yield reliable answers for the study questions within the theoretical setting. Journals of all types require authors to deploy innovative statistical models when analysing collected data. Yet, the problem of advanced modelling strategies still remains — authors disregard key assumptions, choose the wrong analytical strategies and are not aware of alternative strategies to support or reject their hypotheses. This special issue provides readers with a reference framework for some of the most common methodological concerns. The articles included in this monographic issue deal with relatable scenarios and offer state-of-the-art statistical approaches to data treatment. We are confident that this special issue will be extremely useful to past and future authors ofCultura y Educación, and we hope it will increase the quality of the papers published by the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal memory span are reliable correlates of learning to read in English. However, the extent to which these different predictors have the same relative importance in different languages remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results from a 10-month longitudinal study that began just before or soon after the start of formal literacy instruction in four languages (English, Spanish, Slovak, and Czech). Longitudinal path analyses showed that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN (but not verbal memory span) measured at the onset of literacy instruction were reliable predictors, with similar relative importance, of later reading and spelling skills across the four languages. These data support the suggestion that in all alphabetic orthographies, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN may tap cognitive processes that are important for learning to read. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]