Exploring writing in products in students with language impairments and autism spectrum disorders

Oral language skills scaffold written text production; students with oral language difficulties often experience writing problems. The current study examines the ways in which oral language problems experienced by students with language impairment (LI) and students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) impact on their production of written text. One hundred and fifty seven participants (Mage = 10;2) with LI or ASD completed standardized measures of oral language, transcription, working memory, and nonverbal ability and produced a written narrative text assessed for productivity, grammatical accuracy, and quality. Measures of transcription, productivity, and grammatical accuracy, but not text quality, were poorer for students with LI. Transcription skills accounted for the majority of variance in the writing of the LI cohort. For the ASD cohort, handwriting, oral language and autism symptomatology were significant predictors. When students with ASD also experienced language problems, their performance was equivalent to that observed in the LI cohort.

Writing in a non-standard Greek variety: Romanized Cypriot Greek in online chat

Cypriot Greek, a variety of Greek spoken in the island of Cyprus, is relatively distinct from Standard Greek in all linguistic domains. The regional variety does not have a standard, official orthography and it is rarely used for everyday written purposes. Following technological development and the emergence of Computer-mediated Communication, a Romanized version of written CG is now widely used in online text-based communication, among teenagers and young adults (Themistocleous, C. (2008), The use of Cypriot-Greek in synchronous computer-mediated communication (PhD thesis), University of Manchester). In this study, I present the innovative ways that Greek-Cypriots use Roman characters in an effort to represent features of their spoken language in their online writings. By analysing data obtained from channel #Cyprus of Internet Relay Chat, I demonstrate how the choice of writing in CG affects the ways that Roman characters are used. I argue that this practice is not just a response to technological constrains but it actually has a wider social significance.

Writing in French in secondary schools in England and Germany: are the British really 'bad language learners’?

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a research project investigating how German and English 14- to 16-year-old learners of French as a first foreign language compare to one another in their vocabulary knowledge and in the lexical diversity, accuracy and syntactic complexity of their writing. Students from comparable schools in Germany and England were set two writing tasks which were marked by three French native speakers using standardised criteria aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEF). Receptive vocabulary size and lexical diversity were established by the X_lex test and a verb types measure respectively. Syntactic complexity and formal accuracy were respectively assessed using the mean length of T-units (MLTU) and words/error metrics. Students' and teachers' questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to provide information and participants' views on classroom practices, while typical textbooks and feedback samples were analysed to establish differences in materials-related input and feedback in the two countries. The German groups were found to be superior in vocabulary size, and in the accuracy, lexical diversity and overall quality – but not the syntactic complexity – of their writing. The differences in performance outcomes are analysed and discussed with regard to variables related to the educational contexts (e.g. curriculum design and methodology).

Formulaic sequences in native and non-native argumentative writing in German

Whereas there is substantial scholarship on formulaic language in L1 and L2 English, there is less research on formulaicity in other languages. The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals a larger number of 3-grams in WHiG than in Falko-L1, which suggests that British advanced learners of German are more likely to use formulaic language in argumentative writing than their native-speaker counterparts. Secondly, by classifying the formulaic sequences according to their functions, this study finds that native speakers of German prefer discourse-structuring devices to stance expressions, whilst British advanced learners display the opposite preferences. Thirdly, the results show that learners of German make greater use of macro-discourse-structuring devices and cautious language, whereas native speakers favour micro-discourse structuring devices and tend to use more direct language. This study increases our understanding of formulaic language typical of British advanced learners of German and reveals how diverging cultural paradigms can shape written native speaker and learner output.

Are We Terribly Different? : A case-study of male and female fiction-writing in English

The aim of this study is to find similarities and differences between male and female fiction-writing. The data has been collected from pupils at an upper secondary school in Central Sweden. They were given an extract from a novel by Bernard MacLaverty and from that they were supposed to continue the story.Theories that have evolved during the last centuries claim that the language use between men and women differ in many aspects. Women, it is said, use a more emotional language than men do, while men use more expletives than women. Likewise, the language is said to differ in the use of adverbs, verbs and adjectives. It has also been claimed that men and women have different topic developments and that women write longer sentences than men.The results of the current study show that most of these claims are false, or at least not true in this specific context. In most cases there is little or no difference between the male writing and the female writing. There are also cases where the opposite is true – for example, the female participants write shorter sentences than the male participants. A general conclusion of the study is that the writing between the two groups are quite similar – or at least that similarities are present to a larger extent than differences.

The Place of Writing in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh

Abstract This article addresses the theme of place in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, focusing on the concept of place as a physical and psychological entity. The article explores place as a creative force in the work of these two poets, in relation to the act of writing. Seamus Heaney, in his essay “The Sense of Place,” talks about the “history of our sensibilities” that looks to the stable element of the land for continuity: “We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories” (Heaney 1980: 148-9). Thus, in a physical sense, place is understood as a site in which identity is located and defined, but in a metaphysical sense, place is also an imaginative space that maps the landscapes of the mind. This article compares the different ways in which Yeats and Kavanagh relate to their place of writing, physically and artistically, where place is understood as a physical lived space, and as a liberating site for an exploration of poetic voice, where the poet creates his own country of the mind.

The place of writing in the poetry of W.B Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh

This article addresses the theme of place in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, focusing on the concept of place as a physical and psychological entity. The article explores place as a creative force in the work of these two poets, in relation to the act of writing. Seamus Heaney, in his essay “The Sense of Place,” talks about the “history of our sensibilities” that looks to the stable element of the land for continuity: “We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories” (Heaney 1980: 148-9). Thus, in a physical sense, place is understood as a site in which identity is located and defined, but in a metaphysical sense, place is also an imaginative space that maps the landscapes of the mind. This article compares the different ways in which Yeats and Kavanagh relate to their place of writing, physically and artistically, where place is understood as a physical lived space, and as a liberating site for an exploration of poetic voice, where the poet creates his own country of the mind.

Writing in the Mathematics Classroom: Does It Have an Effect on Students’ Mathematical Reasoning?

In this action research study of my classroom of 5th grade mathematics, I investigate how to improve students’ written explanations to and reasoning of math problems. For this, I look at journal writing, dialogue, and collaborative grouping and its effects on students’ conceptual understanding of the mathematics. In particular, I look at its effects on students’ written explanations to various math problems throughout the semester. Throughout the study students worked on math problems in cooperative groups and then shared their solutions with classmates. Along with this I focus on the dialogue that occurred during these interactions and whether and how it moved students to a deeper level of conceptual understanding. Students also wrote responses about their learning in a weekly math journal. The purpose of this journal is two-fold. One is to have students write out their ideas. Second, is for me to provide the students with feedback on their responses. My research reveals that the integration of collaborative grouping, journaling, and active dialogue between students and teacher helps students develop a deeper understanding of mathematics concepts as well as an increase in their confidence as problem solvers. The use of journaling, dialogue, and collaborative grouping reveals themselves as promising learning tasks that can be integrated in a mathematics curriculum that seeks to cultivate students’ thinking and reasoning.

Journal Writing in Mathematics: Exploring the Connections between Math Journals and the Completion of Homework Assignments

In this action research study of sixth grade mathematics, I investigate how the use of written journals facilitates the learning of mathematics for my students. I explore furthermore whether or not these writing journals support students to complete their homework. My analysis reveals that while students do not access their journals daily, when students have the opportunity to write more about one specific problem--such as finding the relationship between the area of two different sized rectangles – they, are nevertheless, more likely to explain their thoughts in-depth and go beyond the traditional basic steps to arrive at a solution. This suggests the value of integrating journal writing in a math curriculum as it can facilitate classroom discussion from the students’ written work.

Writing in a Mathematics Classroom: A Form of Communication and Reflection

In this action research study, I investigated the use of journaling in my seventh grade mathematics classroom. I discovered that journaling can be a very rewarding and beneficial experience for me and for my students. Through journaling, my students became more adept at using correct mathematical terminology in writing and in speaking. The students also believed that they learned the content more deeply and retained it better. Additionally, implementing mathematical journals caused me to emphasize the use of correct terminology and thorough explanations of mathematical thinking in classroom discussions. As a result of this research, I plan to refine my journaling process and continue to use mathematical journals with my future classes.