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Purpose: Difficulties with written expression are an important consideration in the assessment and treatment of school-age children. This study evaluated how intermediate-grade children with and without written language difficulties fared on a writing task housed within the Hayes and Berninger (2014) writing process framework.
Method: Sixty-four children completed a writing task whereby they planned, wrote, and revised a narrative story across 3 days. Children had extended time to produce an outline, first draft, and final copy of their story. Language transcription approaches were used to obtain measures reflecting writing productivity, complexity, accuracy, and mechanics, in addition to measures of planning and revision.
Results: Results indicated that children with writing difficulties produced poorer quality stories compared with their peers yet were not significantly different across all measures. Children with typical development produced longer stories with better spelling accuracy. Writing process measures predicted significant amounts of variance in writing quality across the sample.
Discussion: Writing should be considered as part of language assessment and intervention, whether as the sole language difficulty or alongside difficulties with speaking, listening, or reading in children with language-based learning difficulties. Implications for translation of research to practice and service delivery are provided.
Writing is one of four language modalities of interest to speech and language researchers and practitioners, especially in school-age children. Historically, this interest in writing stems from the relationships between spoken and written language abilities and how to consider these as part of assessment and treatment for children with spoken language impairments. An important consideration, however, is to understand deficits of written expression independent from spoken language disorders or as the point of entry for research and intervention. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA; 2015), language-based learning disabilities are problems with age-expected reading, spelling, and/or writing. Thus, a deficit in written expression, with or without cross-modal language deficits of speaking, listening, or reading, can be considered a language-based learning disability and is well within the scope of practice for the speechlanguage pathologist (SLP; ASHA, 2001).
The Writing Process
Hayes and Berninger (2014) provide a well-supported theoretical framework of writing that includes writing processes and the task environment. Writing processes include a proposer, translator, transcriber, and evaluator. The proposer is a subconscious process that generates ideas to write. The...