Writing Quality: Word-based Fluency and Text-based Complexity Matter

• In Event: Written Language Studies Across Culture

Abstract

First, we sought to examine the word-based fluency (handwriting automaticity, and semantic generation ability) in explaining the Chinese ESL children’s writing composition. Despite previous work on handwriting in relation to writing composition in English-speaking children, however, no known research has investigated the importance of lower-level fluency (such as word-based fluency of handwriting and semantic) matters for Chinese ESL children’s writing. Second, we examined the CohMetrix-scores in terms of the text-based complexity in predicting the children’s writing composition, in order to understand what the precursors to quality writing might be.
We investigated 179 Grade4 students, and 196 Grade7 students written composition, and assessed their handwriting fluency and semantic fluency scores. The measures included three groups. The first group includes Macro-organization, productivity, and mechanical errors hand-coded by experienced writing tutors. As these variables were performance-based control scores. The second groups were handwriting fluency and semantic fluency. They were word-based fluency scores. The third groups of measures were automatically generated CohMetrix scores, in which they included three significant indicators of human rating scores, lexical diversity, syntactic-complexity, and word-frequency. Because they were text-based indicators, we called them text-based complexity scores. The dependent scores were human ratings of the individual written composition using a 7-element rubrics. Following confirmatory factor analysis, 5 of these elements were retained to represent overall human rating of the writing quality for subsequent analyses.
Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted for each grade. After controlling for the performance based scores, 45% of the variance in Grade4, and 32% of the variance in Grade7 in human-rating of the writing quality was explained by word-based fluency (including semantic fluency and handwriting fluency). With the CohMetrix measures of text-based complexity additionally included as a block, 14% additional variance in the equation for Grade4, and 19% for Grade 7 was explained.
To conclude, word-based fluency may be an important element to consider for understanding children’s ESL writing composition. This factor includes two levels of word-based printing fluency and word-generation of semantic fluency. If the kids’ writing ability has not reached its automaticity, in other words, if they have trouble producing the word due to lower handwriting fluency and lower word-generation semantic fluency, they fail to write a good composition. Meanwhile, text-based fluency may be another important element to consider. This second factor reflected by the CohMetrix scores has already been established by previous researchers (Crossly & McNamara, in press). They found that lexical diversity, word-frequency, and syntactic complexity were indicators of human rating for written compositions of ESL writers. In this study, we replicated this finding and extended it to another research context, in which we used the human-rating scores as the dependent variables, and CohMetrix scores of these three measures as a block to predict the students’ written composition reflected by the human ratings. Findings converge. Therefore, we concluded that for developing writers, the both the word-based fluency and text-based fluency matter. While the word-based fluency matters more for younger kids, and text-based fluency matters more for older kids.

Authors

• Arthur C. Graesser, The University of Memphis

• Danielle S. McNamara, Arizona State University

• Qun Guan, East China Normal Uniiversity