Form and meaning in the development of writing

The purpose of this study was to tap preschoolers’ conceptions about the representational meaning of writing via their notation of sentences having different syntactic and semantic relationships. 60 Hebrew speaking children attending nursery school and kindergarten were individually interviewed. Each child dealt with 10 different pairs of sentences; a written sentence and a spoken one. The semantic relationships between the sentences were different in each pair i.e., identity; total difference; redundancy; entailment and inconsistency. Each time the written sentence was read, first by the experimenter and then together with the child. Then, with the written sentence still in front of him, the child was presented with the spoken sentence and asked to write it down.

Children’s writing-procedures became increasingly differentiated reflecting the relationships between the written model and the spoken sentences. A link was found between the type of semantic relationships and children’s writing-procedures. Results are discussed in terms of level of metalinguistic knowledge involved in writing.

     

Going beyond. In tribute to Annette Karmiloff-Smith / Ir más allá. En homenaje a Annette Karmiloff-Smith

This article provides an overview of some of Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s many contributions and the impact of her research on the study of cognitive and linguistic development. Her research work exceeded the dichotomous explanations of development, broadened the limits of developmental periods that are worth examining, emphasized the importance of notational knowledge as a developmental domain and demonstrated the need for research in cognitive science to go beyond describing successful performance on certain tasks in order to more deeply account for representational change.     

Moving wor(l)ds: Practicing evocative language use through fairy tales

Courses: Public Speaking, Storytelling, Performance Ethnography, Oral Interpretation, Language and Communication

Objectives: The aims of this this class exercise are:

• To engage in a collaborative creative process of developing a story/topic from a simple idea to deepening the relationship with the audience through vivid and evocative language;

• To practice the use of various linguistic devices and figures of speech;

• To gain an understanding of the affective and relational functions of language; and

• To gain performance practice.

     

Achieving scientific excellence: An exploratory study of the role of emotional and motivational factors

This study investigates the perceived role of psychological factors in achieving excellence in scientific research. Six outstanding scientists aged 33–42 were interviewed. Data were analyzed inductively resulting in three main dimensions: personality traits and characteristics, psychological skills and processes, and task-specific strategies. Researchers highlighted the importance of emotional factors and motivational processes to achieve and sustain scientific excellence. Flexible coping, emotion regulation, and goal setting were emphasized and described as particularly important in dealing with rejections, setbacks, and team management issues. Persistence and adaptive perfectionism were key individual characteristics which helped participants in nurturing and sustaining motivation. This study suggests that the specific impact of emotional, motivational, and other psychological skills at different stages of excellence development is relevant; yet, further investigation is needed.     

The contribution of vocabulary knowledge and semantic orthographic fluency to text quality through elementary school in Catalan

Building a text is a multidimensional endeavor. Writers must work simultaneously on the content of the text, its discursive organization, the structure of the sentences, and the individual words themselves. Knowledge of vocabulary is central to this endeavor. This study intends (1) to trace the development of writer’s vocabulary depth, their vocabulary fluency in writing, and the features of the text they produce (productivity, lexical richness, and text structure) through elementary school and (2) to determine the contribution of the writer’s performance and the text features to the quality of the text. One hundred and eighty bilingual Spanish/Catalan speakers from first, third, and sixth grade took part in the study. They participated in three researcher-created tasks; a synonyms/antonyms task to orally assess vocabulary depth; a semantic orthographic fluency task to examine their vocabulary fluency in writing; and a text writing task to evaluate text quality. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling in order to examine the relationship between the target writer’s performance and the text features of the written compositions, and the externally evaluated text quality. Results revealed that both writer’s performance on vocabulary depth and semantic orthographic fluency and text features improved with school level. However, the capacity to establish meaning relations between words contributed more directly to the quality of texts than the speed to find words with a specific phonographic correspondence. External evaluation of text quality was more variable for younger students than for older students and was affected by school level mediated by writer performance and text features.