Text cohesion: An exploratory study with beginning writers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Linguistic research on children's acquisition of writing concerns itself largely with the sentence as the highest unit of analysis. However, an adequate account of written language acquisition must deal with the text-productive ability, including devices for cohesion and compactness. The intersentential cohesive devices used by Dutch-speaking children aged 8–9 (N=14) and 10–11 (N=14) in narrative texts are analysed and compared in this report. The coding of the cohesive devices followed Halliday and Hasan (1976). The writing samples were also analysed for degrees of cohesiveness and compactness, using the formulae suggested by Scinto (1983). Our findings indicate a developmental trend in the construction of more cohesive and compact narrative texts.

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