CHILDRENS REVISION OF TEXTUAL FLAWS

Two studies are reported here that investigated elementary school chil dren's text revision. In the first experiment, both semantic and surfa ce flaws were inserted in texts that varied in reading difficulty. Sec ond-grade through fifth-grade students revised these experimenter-gene rated passages, presented as examples of submissions to a class newspa per. Differences in text reading difficulty did not affect revision ef fectiveness, nor were the semantic flaws especially difficult to detec t and revise. An age effect showed growth in the revision of both sema ntic and surface errors from grades 2 to 4 with 2nd-graders revising o ne-third of the inserted errors, and 4th- and 5th-graders revising thr ee-quarters of them. Revision and doze reading comprehension skills we re correlated. A second study compared students' revision of their own as well as another's text flaws. Fifth-graders wrote a narrative for a classroom anthology, and they revised both their own and inserted fl aws. Their writing was evaluated holistically. Rates of both semantic and surface revision were somewhat lower for their own as opposed to a nother's text errors, but revision rates were nevertheless relatively high, and they correlated with writing quality; that is, children who wrote high-quality texts also revised more errors, especially experime nter-inserted flaws. These data confirm that children respond positive ly to writing challenges in the area of revision, a skill in process o f development, which is amenable to inspection and appears ripe for fa cilitation.