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Text cohesion: An exploratory study with beginning writers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Philip Yde  and
Marc Spoelders
Philip Yde*
Affiliation:
Ghent State University
Marc Spoelders
Affiliation:
Ghent State University
*
Philip Yde, Laboratory for Education, Ghent State University, 1 Henri Dunantlaan, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium
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Abstract

Linguistic research on children's acquisition of writing concerns itself largely with the sentence as the highest unit of analysis. However, an adequate account of written language acquisition must deal with the text-productive ability, including devices for cohesion and compactness. The intersentential cohesive devices used by Dutch-speaking children aged 8–9 (N=14) and 10–11 (N=14) in narrative texts are analysed and compared in this report. The coding of the cohesive devices followed Halliday and Hasan (1976). The writing samples were also analysed for degrees of cohesiveness and compactness, using the formulae suggested by Scinto (1983). Our findings indicate a developmental trend in the construction of more cohesive and compact narrative texts.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 407 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

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