This article considers how children and young people conceptualize and construct different types of texts. The initial parts of narrative and expository texts written by grade-schoolers, adolescents, and adults were analyzed, on the assumption that the opening to a piece of discourse serves as a window on the text as a whole. Analysis was…

This paper explores various epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people. These paradigms all draw upon a metadiscourse of developmental age and stage (e.g. Hall 1914) and then work from particular epistemological views of the world to cast young people in different lights. Using strategic…

The developmental stages of writing can be related to Jean Piaget's final three stages of development (preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational) and to the narrative, descriptive, explanative, analytical, and artistic rhetorical modes. As the child enters kindergarten or the first grade, narrative blooms. By this age most young…

A study examined (1) developmental differences in the writing of urban students, (2) the syntactic complexity associated with differing modes of written discourse, and (3) the relationship among grade level, mode of discourse, and writing quality. Subjects were approximately 1,200 second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade students from large…

The writing of five first grade children was studied to determine whether findings of a previous study regarding children's concept of story structure would be demonstrated in the children's original compositions. The weekly sessions during the study included individual or group prewriting discussions, drawing and active writing, modeling by the…

A study was conducted to (1) examine the relation of syntactic complexity to mode of discourse in the writing of eighth and twelfth grade students; (2) determine to what extent variations observed were related to grade level, socioeconomic status, and race; and (3) determine to what extent the syntactic complexity achieved on a rewriting task…

To explore student facility with argumentative writing, 40 persuasive essays of 5th, 7th, and 11th grade students were analyzed for their relative percentage of reporting (narrating), interpreting, generalizing, and speculative sentences. Fifth and seventh graders were found to use significantly more narrative and fewer generalizations than older…