INTRAINDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN LEVELS OF LANGUAGE IN INTERMEDIATE GRADE WRITERS - IMPLICATIONS FOR THE TRANSLATING PROCESS

In contrast to much research on writing acquisition that has focused o n interindividual differences among children by comparing good and poo r writers at the extremes of the distribution of writing ability, this research focused on intraindividual differences within children along the continuum of writing ability. Advanced planning, on-line planning , translating, and posttranslation reviewing/revising tasks were given to 16 fourth, 16 fifth, and 16 sixth graders. Intraindividual differe nces occurred in the planning tasks and in levels of language at the w ord, sentence, and text levels on the translating and revising tasks. Neither individual differences in planning nor metacognitive understan ding of translating was related to quality of translating. Verbal work ing memory-generation but not verbal working memory-recall was correla ted with the translating task and the reviewing/revising task at the t ext level. We concluded that intraindividual differences in levels of language and verbal working memory-generation should be taken into acc ount in modeling the translating process of developing writers.