Narrative and information text writing among Icelandic children: What determines different progress rates in early elementary school?

Abstract

Text writing is a complex task, which takes children a long time to master. During the first years of elementary school, children´s proficiency in text writing is relatively poor. Their texts tend to be short, lacking both coherence and cohesion, and they do not follow a genre specific structure. In the elementary years, children´s text writing ability grows steadily and can continue to do so into adulthood. According to the simple view of writing (Berninger, 2000) transcription, text generation, and self-regulation are important skills that lay the foundation for text writing. With increasing encoding abilities, linguistic skills, and knowledge about text genres, children’s ability to write texts steadily increases through the elementary grades. Research also indicates that children’s performance in text writing is strongly influenced by various aspects of their learning environment. These include the emphasis placed on writing instruction in their school, the nature of the instruction and even culture-specific views on writing and the teaching of writing. Thus, in order to gain a better understanding of the processes involved in the acquisition of writing, research based on children from a variety of cultures and learning contexts is of high importance. Very few studies have focused on the development of writing-skills among Icelandic-speaking children. Consequently, limited knowledge exists as to how Icelandic students acquire this important aspect of literacy and how their performance and progress is related to encoding skills, vocabulary, selfregulation, and other important basics of writing. The main purpose of this study was to: 1) investigate Icelandic children’s progress in narrative and information text writing in the first years of elementary school; 2) estimate whether progress in the two text genres is comparable, and; 3) appraise the effect of encoding, vocabulary, and self-regulation on progress in text writing. This study constitutes part of a larger longitudinal research project on children’s language, literacy, and self-regulation. A group of 45 Icelandic children from two schools was observed through first, second, third, and fourth grade and varied data were collected each year. The data used in the current analyses consists of teachers’ evaluation of the children´s self-regulation in first grade, and an assessment of their vocabulary, encoding (spelling) and text writing (narrative and informative texts) in second, third and fourth grades. To estimate the children’s progress in text writing, text samples were analyzed according to text length, structure, and cohesion. Based on the results of progress in text writing, the children were divided into three groups; children who showed slow progress, average progress, and good progress. Potential differences in spelling, vocabulary, and self-regulation between the three groups were explored. Considerable individual differences were found regarding the children’s performance each year and their progress from year to year. Some children showed significant progress, while others hardly progressed at all across the three years. Data analyses did not suggest that the children´s self-regulation, encoding skills, or vocabulary were related to their performance or progress in text writing. In some cases, poor text writing ability and slow progress can be explained by difficulties in encoding skills. However, not all the children who showed slow progress had problems in encoding and some children who had problems in encoding showed good progress in text writing. Indications were also found that strong vocabulary, encoding, and self-regulation skills are related to better texts and stimulate faster progress. Nevertheless, some children who did well in vocabulary, encoding, and self-regulation progressed slowly over the three years. Even though the results do not demonstrate a clear relation between children´s self-regulation, encoding skills or vocabulary and text writing, our findings indicate that children performing at a lower writing level at the beginning of the study showed better progress than children who had a higher initial writing ability. These results may indicate that the instruction provided in the early elementary grades is not stimulating enough for children who already have reached a fluent transcription level. Considering the importance of writing to children’s academic success, teaching methods must meet the needs of all children. Furthermore, it is necessary to teach both encoding skills and text generation, as well as supporting children in developing their self-regulation skills in order to promote their writing process.