Assessing text generation in expressive writing difficulties

Expressive writing difficulties involve three types of writing problem: the inability to a) form letters (dysgraphia), b) write words spontaneously or under dictation, and c) organize words into meaningful thoughts. This latter problem pertains to the process of text generation and, probably, is the most poorly understood learning disability. Developmental models of writing describe linguistic text generation as a core process in writing (Berninger et al., 2002). However, these processes are often overlooked in the assessment of writing difficulties and explicit identification of language skills relevant to text generation is lacking in developmental models (Dockrell et al., 2009). One of the reasons for this lack of attention, is the difficulty of measuring performance in open-ended tasks (Bishop & Clarkson, 2003). The goal of this study was to identify text generation measures which were both sensitive and predictive of expressive writing difficulties in a population of novice writers. Two tasks for assessing the process of text generation in young writers were developed and evaluated in this study: a Sentence Reformulation and a Sentence Generation Task (Arfé et al., 2009). Their predictive value and sensitivity compared with other standardized language tests (RAN, PPVT-R, a Picture Naming Task and TROG) have been evaluated. Ninety-nine 2nd (N=54) and 3rd graders (N=45), balanced for gender, participated in this study. Children’s receptive vocabulary and syntax, picture naming and rapid naming skills (RAN) were assessed individually. A Sentence Reformulation Task (reformulating a target sentence in three different ways), a Sentence Generation Task (generating written sentences from two concrete words) and a narrative text production task were administered collectively. Text production was coded for orthographic correctness, lexical correctness, grammatical fluency (overall number of sentences) and syntactic complexity (number of correct subordinates). Results show that receptive vocabulary breadth and receptive grammar do not predict children’s expressive writing skills with respect to the dependent measures considered in this study. Measures of lexical access (picture naming) and sentence elaboration (Sentence Reformulation and Generation), are the most predictive of children’s expressive writing skills, while Sentence Reformulation and Generation are the most sensitive in identifying children with poor expressive writing skills.