The development of writing competence in primary school: Referential and relational coherence
Final Report Abstract
Students have to be able to write texts that are coherent both on the relational and on the referential level. The main goal of the present project was to investigate the development of relational and referential coherence in primary school with a large longitudinal text corpus. The results concerning relational coherence are largely consistent with earlier research in regard to the acquisition of coherence relations and the development of the inventory of connectives. Moreover, it was shown that the syntactic positions of adverb connectives clearly differ from their positions in adult language. More specifically, there is a strong tendency towards positioning in the so called ‘Vorfeld’. The results concerning referential coherence in regard to direct anaphora are also consistent with the results of earlier studies, for instance, in regard to the relatively late occurrence of indefinite noun phrases for introducing referents or in regard to preferences concerning particular protagonist types. In our project, the development of cognitively demanding anaphor types like indirect anaphora, complex anaphora, and plural anaphora was investigated for the first time. Indirect anaphora start based on schemata but cannot always be easily distinguished from definite introductions of referents – this relates most likely to the incomplete development of the theory of mind. Complex anaphors appear very early as formulae like Das war toll (‚That was great’) in narratives. Constructions beyond this simple basic type, however, occur rarely and much later. Plural anaphora occur earlier than complex anaphors. With all three anaphor types, the distance between anaphor and antecedent(s) increases between first and fourth grade. Moreover, the inventory of realizations is enlarged in regard to word classes as well as grammatical functions. Lexical realizations, however, occur relatively late. The development typically starts with simple patterns that are differentiated with time. At the end of class 4, there are still many differences as compared to adult language.
Publications
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Die Entwicklung kognitiv komplexer Anapherntypen in schriftlichen Texten von Grundschulkindern. Vortrag, 23. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium
Lohmann, Amelie
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Phasen der Kohärenzentwicklung: Referenzielle und relationale Kohärenz in schriftlichen Texten von Grundschulkindern. Vortrag, 23. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium
Linerova, Karolina
