The development of writing competence in primary school: Referential and relational coherence

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The project aims to investigate the acquisition and implementation of coherence in written texts of primary school students. Coherence is set up on various text levels. On the one hand, referential coherence deals with connections between identical or related referents within a text. Relational coherence, on the other hand, deals with semantic relations such as, for instance, causality or contrast between propositions or larger pieces of text. The acquisition of referential coherence in text production has not been studied intensely so far. This holds especially with regard to cognitively demanding types of anaphors such as plural anaphors, combination anaphors, indirect anaphors or complex anaphors. Based on a longitudinal text corpus, the present project focusses on the development of referential coherence and relates it to other aspects of writing competence such as orthography, variety in sentence structure and word order, and the scope of the lexicon. Closing a research gap, for the first time in this way, the project aims to work up a comprehensive model of the emergence of coherence during primary school. The developmental phases and their variability in time, according to the level of performance of children, will be made explicit. By following these goals, the project will also provide results regarding the range of performance within specific grades and, hence, present a milestone for further research on implications for differentiating education in German.