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

本研究旨在探讨小学生在书面语篇中连贯性的习得和运用。连贯建立在不同的语篇层次上。一方面，指称连贯涉及语篇中相同或相关指称之间的联系。另一方面，关系连贯处理语义关系，例如命题或较大文本之间的因果关系或对比。语篇产出中指称连贯的习得迄今为止还没有得到深入的研究。这一点尤其适用于对认知要求较高的回指语类型，如复数回指语、组合回指语、间接回指语或复合回指语。基于一个纵向的文本语料库，本项目的重点是参考连贯的发展，并将其与写作能力的其他方面，如正字法，句子结构和语序的变化，以及词汇的范围。该项目首次以这种方式填补了研究空白，旨在建立一个小学阶段连贯性出现的综合模型。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内的表现范围的结果，因此，为进一步研究德国差异化教育的影响提供了一个里程碑。

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.