Written Language & Literacy - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009

Attaining rhetorical competence requires the capacity to use linguistic form to communicate discourse stance as well as discourse content. Languages provide their speakers with a range of options to express content in ways that reveal orientation, generality of reference, and attitude to the propositional content of their message to create a more involved or detached discourse stance. This paper focuses on the linguistic means used by children (9–10-, 12–13-, and 15–16-year olds) and university graduate students in French and Spanish in their attempt to create a detached discourse stance in expository texts. Two types of linguistic means for encoding discourse stance are examined: local devices which call for the manipulation of morphology and the lexicon, and phrase-level devices which require manipulation of argument structure. Our results show (1) that children in both languages are sensitive to the necessity of encoding a depersonalized discourse stance in expository texts early on; (2) that local devices are productive before those involving the rearrangement of argument structure; and (3) that with development and increasing interaction with academic texts the range of devices employed increases. The data reveal that for the phrase-level devices French speakers prefer passive constructions, while Spanish-speakers prefer se-constructions. Our results illustrate how later language development is influenced by language-specific facts and literacy interacting with universally shared communicative needs.

Learning to write paragraphs and thus learning how to sub-divide a text for topical and organisational coherence is an accepted part of acquiring writing maturity, and most teachers of writing will include explicit teaching of paragraphing techniques within their writing instruction classes. However, there is relatively little pedagogical or empirical attention devoted to understanding the nature of development in paragraphing — how writers increase in sophistication in managing paragraphs, and the pathways of development from not using paragraphs to secure mastery. The study reported here, therefore, set out to answer the research question — what developmental trajectories are evident in mastering paragraphing in secondary-aged writers? The article draws on a detailed linguistic analysis of a corpus of writing samples from 359 students stratified by age (13 or 15) and gender and posits a model of development in which the trajectory is from graphical organisation through to topical organisation and finally to textual organisation. However, the trajectory is not simply linear as the demands of longer, more complex texts create new challenges in paragraph organisation for able writers.

The majority view of reading development maintains the importance of specific cognitive and linguistic abilities, e.g. phonological awareness (PA) and vocabulary and verbal working memory (VWM). Another factor in attaining literacy may be the language of exposure, e.g. whether it has a transparent or a deep orthography. This study examines the interaction between known predictors for literacy development and the orthography. It focuses on early levels of literacy (decoding and spelling) amongst children with typical language development. English-speaking (deep orthography) and Croatian-speaking (transparent orthography) kindergarteners were assessed on measures of vocabulary, PA, functions of verbal working memory, and early literacy skills at the beginning of the kindergarten year. The results indicate that a transparent orthography (Croatian) increases early decoding and encoding skills and they show expected correlations between PA, vocabulary, and early literacy abilities. English speakers did not show these correlations at the onset of the kindergarten year. We postulate that the nature of the deep orthography requires some instructional time for English-speaking children before PA and vocabulary will show predictive validity for reading acquisition.

The present article examines spelling strategies of children of two different linguistic backgrounds, namely Luxembourgish and Romanophone. In Luxembourg, German literacy skills are acquired from grade 1 on and written French classes begin in grade 3. Luxembourgish is the language of communication, although a high number of Romanophone foreigners speak French in their daily life. In the underlying investigation, Luxembourgish (n = 202) and Romanophone (n = 44) children performed a dictation in German and French. The aim was to see whether a child’s linguistic background influences spelling or whether the relative high transparency of the German writing system eliminates this linguistic difference. In French, both groups performed similarly which proposes no influence of linguistic background on spelling. In German, however, Luxembourgish children obtained higher scores than Romanophones and the latter were more affected by word frequency which suggests that they encounter more difficulties in applying more complex spelling strategies. The more transparent German writing system is not sufficient to erase the linguistic difference between the two groups.

In the study of reading, there is a debate about whether letters or graphemes are the primary units of perception. A promising data basis for empirically contributing to this debate can be gained from measuring the perception of single vowel letters compared to vowel digraphs. We used letter detection with masked pseudoword primes on pseudoword targets among skilled native readers in order to test for the existence and time course of vowel digraph effects during reading in deep (English) and shallow (Dutch) orthographies. Selecting these two languages, which are similar in terms of syllabic structure, allowed us to use exactly the same pseudoword stimuli. Results indicate that whereas the Dutch readers show letter effects at short prime durations and digraph effects at longer prime durations, the English readers show only letter effects. These findings are inconsistent with a strong version of the claim that graphemes are perceptual in nature, but consistent with models of reading acquisition and skilled reading that predict that, although letter effects always precede grapheme effects, grapheme activation proceeds faster in relatively shallow orthographies than in relatively deep ones.

The effect of Crowding has long been recognised by cognitive psychologists engaged in examining the reading process. Yet it is not generally taken into account by most field linguists involved in the development of tone orthographies for emerging African languages. True, there is a general recognition that diacritic overload is unhelpful, but this has never been articulated with the help of the more precise terminology already on offer from the field of cognitive psychology. Using an experimental tone orthography developed for Kabiye (Gur, Togo) as an example, I postulate that an exhaustive representation of tone by means of accents will trigger Crowding. This is a hypothesis that has yet to be tested under clinical conditions. But the aim of this article is to call the phenomenon by its name for the first time and thereby stimulate further research. I also hope to demonstrate by means of this single example the gulf that exists between cognitive psychology and linguistics. Once we recognise that the gulf exists, we can begin to build bridges.