engleski

Story writing skills of adolescents with SLI

Since text writing demands simultaneous use of linguistic, orthographic and discourse skills (Smith-Lock et al., 2009), it is justified to expect that children who struggle with the acquisition of oral language in early childhood are less proficient writers later on. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to compare written narratives of adolescents with and without specific language impairment (SLI). In order to assess level of productivity, i.e. content, cohesion and coherence of the written text, 21 adolescents with SLI and 21 with typical language development (TLD) ages 12 to 15 were recruited. With the intention of testing if adolescents are skilled writers (Berninger et al., 1992), 22 healthy adults were included in this study as well. The results confirm that TLD adolescents and adults do not differ on any of the variables. However, they show that adolescents with SLI and TLD adolescents differ on the following variables: text length, content, cohesion and the amount and type of errors they produce. To be more specific, adolescents with SLI tend to write shorter stories which lack content elements (importance, significance, thoroughness and creativity), cohesive devices (reference, conjunction, lexical ties and substitution) and they produce more phonologic-orthographic and morpho-syntactic errors.

Written narratives ; Adolescents ; Specific language impairment ; Typical language development

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