Revising strategies of narrative writing in primary grade students
Submitted by:
Fátima Olivares
Abstract:
Background. Textual revision is considered, from general theoretical writing models, as an important process which affects directly the quality of students’ texts. There are many factors that influence students’ revising skills as students’ development level and the nature of the revision (surface vs. deep) (Hayes, 2012). When children are asked to revise their text changes tend to be superficial rather than deep and typically result in minimal benefit to the text (Alamargot y Chanquoy, 2001).
Aim. In this study we investigated: i) students’ revising strategies (detection and correction), and ii) the relation between revising strategies and the quality of the final written product.
Sample. In this study took part 826 students from 4th to 6th grades of Primary Education in Spain, with age ranged between 9 and 13 years old.
Method. Students were asked to write a story and to revise another researcher-created story aimed to assess students’ revision skills (detection and correction of surface and deep errors). From the detection task we get two measures as total number of errors accurately located and accurately described. From the correction task we get several measures as total number of errors solve, number of accurately corrections and the strategy use by the students to solve the accurately corrected problems (edition, addition, deletion, transformation, replace, swap, distribution and consolidation). One point was given to students if they corrected the problem and one point more if the correction was effective. These measures were calculated separately for mechanical and substantive errors.
Results. We expect to find a growth tendency of the revising skills across schooling. In particular, as students growth they would perform more effective deep revisions, which will have a positive impact on text quality. We will present definitive findings in the conference.
Note: This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through a project awarded to the author Raquel Fidalgo (EDU2015-67484-P).
Alamargot, D. & Chanquoy, L. (2001). Through the models of writing. Kluwer Academic Puvlishers: Dordrecht
Hayes, J. R. (2012). Modeling and remodeling writing. Written Communication, 29 (3), 369-388.