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Modeling the relationship between lexico-grammatical and discourse organization skills in middle grade writers: insights into later productive language skills that support academic writing

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Abstract

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4–8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support precise and concise academic writing and (2) paragraph-level structures for organizing written discourse, known as micro-genres. Writing studies typically elicit and analyze long compositions, instead the present study employed two brief writing tasks that allowed for the evaluation of language skills while minimizing the influence of topic knowledge and other non-linguistic factors. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that the two facets of language proficiency studied—lexico-grammatical skills and skill in producing paragraph-level structures (micro-genres)—represented distinguishable dimensions of productive language skill in this sample. On both dimensions, older writers (grades 6–8) demonstrated greater skill than 4th and 5th graders. These findings, which provide an initial proof of concept for the use of short writing tasks to study language skills that support academic writing, are discussed in relation to writing theory and pedagogy.

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Notes

  1. A horse is a four-legged + mammal + that can be ridden for + transportation.

    (compact pre-modifier) + (superordinate) + (relative clause + nominalization).

  2. In this study, English Language Learners (ELLs) refers to students who the school district have determined to face difficulty in accessing classroom instruction in English because of their levels of English proficiency.

  3. Of note for this study, which employs a relatively small sample (n = 235), are the findings of Flora and Curran (2004), who demonstrated that WLSMV produced accurate test statistics, standard errors, and parameter estimates for medium sized models (10–15 indicators) with small samples (150–200). Therefore, we have reason to believe that the sample used in this study, which employed a particularly parsimonious model, is adequate.

  4. Because the discourse-level structure text continuation items had patently non-normal distributions (most students received a score of 1 or 5), these items were recoded as binary variables (answers scored 1–3 = 0; answers scored as 4–5 = 1). In contrast, the definition scores showed a normal distribution and were retained as they were scored.

  5. However, for this model, SRMR is not reported because this fit statistic does not perform well with binary indicators (Yu, 2002).

  6. Other models also fit the data, including a single factor model as well as an alternative two-factor model that included unique dimensions for Lexico-grammatical skill’ and ‘knowledge of paragraph-level organization structures,’ but, unlike the winning model described above, specified cross-loadings between two indicators on the latter latent factor. Each of these models had important limitations. For example, a single factor model comprised of five indicators (a single testlet representing Lexico-grammatical skill and four indicators representing knowledge of discourse-level structures) was a good fit to the data {X 2(11) = 10.16, p = 0.07, RMSEA = 0.07 (90 % CI 0.00–0.125), TLI = 0.98, CFI = 0.99}. Yet, this model was not invariant across middle grade and elementary grade populations, and, as a result, would be inappropriate for comparing the performance in these two groups. Additionally, a two-factor model that specified a cross-loading between two indicator of the four indicators that comprised the latent construct ‘knowledge of paragraph-level organization structures’ was not selected as the final model despite demonstrating good fit to the data because there appears to be no sound theoretical reason for specifying this relationship between these two indicators. It is possible that construct-irrelevant features of the task—such as the similarity in format between these two items –may be at the root of this apparent shared variance. Future researchers might explore these models.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education through Grant R305F100026, which was awarded to the Strategic Education Research Partnership as part of the Reading for Understanding Research Initiative. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the institute or the US Department of Education. We express our gratitude to the students and teachers who shared their valuable time and insights with us and to our numerous colleagues for their helpful comments as we conducted this work. In particular, we want to give special thanks to our colleague Emilio Sánchez from the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, who worked closely during 1 year as we designed the CALS-I. We would also like to thank Alejandra Meneses for her leadership in the design of the scoring system applied to both the tasks used in this study. We also express gratitude to Christina Dobbs, Jessica Scott and Mary Burkhauser for support during this pilot study. Special thanks are also due to Catherine E. Snow, Andrew Ho and Katherine Mason for their feedback on this draft. Finally, we want to thank the three anonymous reviewers and Michael J. Kieffer whose encouraging and helpful feedback contributed to improving this article.

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Correspondence to Emily Phillips Galloway.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6, 7, 8.

Table 6 Superordinate Precision Scale
Table 7 Structural Density Scale
Table 8 Paragraph continuations scoring and examples from students’ texts

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Galloway, E.P., Uccelli, P. Modeling the relationship between lexico-grammatical and discourse organization skills in middle grade writers: insights into later productive language skills that support academic writing. Read Writ 28, 797–828 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9550-7

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