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

该项目旨在调查小学生在书面文本中连贯性的习得和实施。连贯建立在不同的文本层次上。一方面，指称连贯处理语篇中相同或相关的指称物之间的联系。另一方面，关系连贯处理的是语义关系，例如命题之间的因果关系或命题之间的对比。语篇生产中指称连贯的习得迄今尚未得到深入的研究。这尤其适用于认知要求较高的隐喻类型，如复数隐喻、组合隐喻、间接隐喻或复杂隐喻。基于纵向文本语料库，本项目侧重于指称连贯的发展，并将其与写作能力的其他方面联系起来，如正字法、句子结构和词序的多样性以及词典的范围。该项目首次以这种方式缩小了研究差距，旨在建立一个综合的小学连贯性出现模型。根据儿童的表现水平，将明确说明发展阶段及其随时间的变化。通过遵循这些目标，该项目还将提供有关特定年级的表现范围的结果，从而为进一步研究德语差异化教育的影响提供里程碑。

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.