Written Language & Literacy - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2020

Abstract

This paper argues for pragmatism rather than linguistic purity in orthography design for endangered Indigenous languages such as Blackfoot, emphasizing the need to see orthography standardization as a dynamic process rather than a static result. It explores the ongoing lack of community agreement about the best way to write the Blackfoot language and lack of widespread proficiency in the use of its standard orthography, and then describes ways in which this is mitigated in the Blackfoot Language Resources and Digital Dictionary project, a suite of web resources created to support language maintenance and revitalization work. The website uses a combination of relaxed searches, alternative spelling fields, and multimedia content to increase accessibility of the resources for users lacking proficiency in the standard orthography.

Abstract

Previous research on teaching summarizing skill has focused on summarizing strategies that are appropriate for expository texts rather than narrative text. Findings of these studies showed an advantage for older over younger students but did not control for text difficulty, so age effects may have been confounded by text difficulty. The present study tested an intervention designed to improve summarizing of narrative texts, taking into account the factor of text difficulty. Thirty fourth-grade participants (mean age = 9.7 years) were pretested for reading and summarizing skill. Participants receiving the summarizing treatment (N = 15) were taught to write summaries of narrative texts based on story grammar components. Participants receiving the writing control treatment (N = 15) were taught to write about connections between their lives and the text. Results showed that the story grammar intervention improved the quality of narrative summaries and that better summaries came from easier text than harder text. The present study reveals a shortcoming of previous summarizing studies that attributed superior performance to age without considering text difficulty. Findings show the effectiveness of teaching fourth graders to apply story grammar components to improve their skill in summarizing narrative text.

Abstract

Starting from a usage-based perspective of language acquisition, the present study investigates the occurrence of connectives in BasiLex, an 11.5 million word corpus of texts Dutch children encounter during the primary school years (grades 1–6). Specifically, we investigate how connective frequencies change across grades, how these changes reflect the theorized orders of connective acquisition in the work of Bloom et al. (1980) and Evers-Vermeul & Sanders (2009), and we make a comparison with the frequencies of connectives in the adult written language corpus Celex. Briefly summarized, our findings show that the numbers of connectives increase sharply after grade 1 and then more steadily across grades 2 to 6; we see some reflection of the connective acquisition theory of Evers-Vermeul & Sanders in the connective frequencies in texts offered to children; and we see some remarkable similarities between connective frequencies in the adult corpus Celex as compared to connective frequencies in grade 1 and grade 6 texts in BasiLex. Our findings suggest that the written input offered to children harmonizes with theoretical approaches that emphasize the incremental growth of word knowledge in children as a function of exposure.

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that negated text is a particularly difficult text construction, and often leads to readers having difficulty understanding and remembering what they have read. To date, attempts at identifying a strategy that would aid in readers’ comprehension of negation have not been successful. However, in studies focused on affirmative text, readers practicing retrieving information from a text showed improvements in comprehension and more accurate metacomprehension judgments. The present study aimed to determine whether this strategy also benefits readers of passages in which a critical concept has been negated. Interestingly, results demonstrated that while readers judged their comprehension to be better when practicing retrieval, their comprehension was not actually better. These results suggest that simply practicing retrieval information is not necessarily enough to enhance comprehension or metacomprehension of this text construction.

Abstract

The present study compared the relationship between Dutch phonological awareness (rhyme awareness, initial phoneme isolation), Dutch speech decoding and Dutch receptive vocabulary in two groups in different linguistic environments: 30 Mandarin Chinese-Dutch bilingual children and 24 monolingual Dutch peers. Chinese vocabulary and phonological awareness were taken into account in the bilingual group. Bilingual children scored below their Dutch monolingual counterparts on all Dutch tasks. In the bilingual group, Dutch rhyme awareness was predicted by Dutch speech decoding, both directly, and indirectly via Dutch receptive vocabulary. When adding Chinese proficiency to the model, Chinese rhyme awareness was found to mediate the relationship between Dutch speech decoding and Dutch rhyme awareness. It can thus be concluded that second language (L2) phonological awareness in Chinese-Dutch kindergartners is affected by their L2 speech and vocabulary level, on the one hand, and their level of phonological awareness in the first language (L1).

This article reviews How Writing Works. From the Invention of the Alphabet to the Rise of Social Media