TEXT COHESION IN CHILDRENS NARRATIVE WRITING

This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relati onship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower leve l analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in either a story free-writing condition or a story rewriting condition. The results showed that both cohesive indices and lower level writing measures (type-token ratios, mean length of utterances in morphemes, composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amount of t he variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved t o facilitate the children's writing processes and, hence, resulted in higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and te xt cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.