L'apprentissage de l'orthographe lexicale.

Numéro 222

Pause Time Patterns in Writing Narrative and Expository Texts by Children and Adults

Contains fulltext : 72899.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)How do beginning and skilled writers compose a text in the course of time? To gain insight into the temporal aspects of planning and translating activities during writing, this article examined writing in real time and analyzed pause time patterns in writing in relation to linguistic characteristics of the written product. Fourth-grade children and adults wrote a narrative text (a personal experience) and an expository text on a socially relevant issue. They wrote their texts by hand, and a computer-controlled digitizer tablet recorded handwriting movements. Developmental patterns in pause duration as a function of genre and linguistic features of pause locations (word, clause, sentence) were studied. In a more detailed analysis, pause time patterns related to the syntactic linking of clauses were examined, and whether pause time patterning varies with different types of clauses was also examined (i.e., main clauses, coordinate clauses, finite and nonfinite subordinate clauses, and restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses). Analyses showed that pause time duration is different in narrative and expository texts, and varies with syntactic location in that both 4th-grade children and adults take more time to plan and decide at higher syntactic levels. Pause duration also varies with the syntactic linking of clauses: Children and adults pause longer before writing main clauses than before coordinate clauses, and pause longer before writing coordinate clauses than before subordinate clauses—a pattern found in narrative and expository texts. This suggests that the time beginning and adult writers take to decide on how to express their ideas in syntactically linked clauses depends on grammatical and functional aspects of clauses

Perception of the cursive handwriting movement in writers and pre-writers

International audienceThe objective of this study was to confirm the existence of knowledge relating to the cursive writing movement for French pupils in 3rd year of kindergarten, 2nd grade and 5th grade of elementary school. 141 pupils were asked to watch a visual presentation of cursive handwriting to determine whether they were able to detect violations of two rules of handwriting: continuity and sequentiality of the cursive handwriting movement. Our results showed progressive development of the understanding of characteristics of the cursive handwriting movement, with different developmental trajectories of knowledge for the different rules. The ability to detect continuity of the cursive writing movement developed earlier than the ability to detect sequentiality. Correct decisions were not always accompanied by correct justifications, which developed more slowly than detection of rule violations