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Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy: In honor of Ludo Verhoeven
Edited by Eliane Segers and Paul van den Broek
[Not in series 206] 2017
► pp. 103–118

Hunting for the links between word-level writing skills and text quality

| | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
| | Universitat de Barcelona

A recurring claim in developmental models of written composition is that text quality depends to a large extent on efficient word-level writing skills (handwriting and spelling), at least in the early grades. In this chapter, we show that this assumption has a weak empirical basis because of (1) the unsystematic way in which the quality of written texts has been assessed, and (2) the inconclusiveness of findings about the word-text writing relationship in developmental studies of writing. We claim that the demands of transcription have been overestimated, while the explanatory power of high-level components has been majorly overlooked. We conclude that it is the command of high-level text features and skills what makes learning to write a complex, life-long process.

Keywords: early writing, text quality, word-level, text-level
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Assessing the quality of written texts
    • 2.1Holistic scoring
    • 2.2Analytic scoring
  • 3.The impact of transcription skills on writing quality
    • 3.1Spoken and written text quality
  • 4.Going beyond low-level components to explain text quality
    • 4.1High-level writing processes: Task schemas and topic knowledge
    • 4.2Working memory and executive functions
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.206.07sal
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