Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 19, Issue 2, 1985

The aim of this study was to describe the development of audience-adapted writing skills between the end of elementary school and the beginning of college. Students in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11, and college freshmen, were given the task of rewriting a linguistically complex story for a young reader. Analyses of rewritten stories showed significant, agerelated decreases in mean lexical and syntactic complexity, as well as significant increases in mean reading ease. Further analyses of the alteration of difficult lexical items and rewriting of the moral of the story suggested a shift from extensive use of “word-oriented” strategies in the lower grades to increasing use of a “meaning-oriented” approach in the higher grades.

Given the existing literature on text summarization that documents what learners, particularly younger learners, cannot do, a study was designed to assess what fifth-grade students can do. Thirty students at two reading levels read an expository text, produced a summary, reflected on the summarizing process, and identified good and bad summaries for the text. Both successful and less successful readers were fairly adept at recognizing good summaries, but proficiency group differences emerged for production and reflection measures. Readers in both proficiency groups performed at below-ceiling levels on the production and reflection measures.

The discussion of the nature and role of so-called “dialect, interference” in writing has been carried on in a literature which has failed to define its terms consistently, reported experimental results for poorly defined samples, and assumed much that has yet to be established empirically. Written partially as a response to Patrick Hartwell’s 1980 RTE article on the same topic, this paper examines these flaws in the literature of dialect interference in greater detail, examines the seven “correlates” of Hartwell’s “print code hypothesis” and finds them wanting or uninstructive, and sets forth suggestions for a more sophisticated study of this issue.