Extended Discourse

Extended Discourse Genres

• Categories of Discourse: Extended discourse genres include both writing and speaking.

• Importance in Curriculum:

  • Prominent in school curriculum across all grades.
  • Improves over time in several aspects such as:
  • Length
  • Complexity
  • Range of Topics, Purposes, and Audiences

• Key Requirements for Producing Discourse:

  • Planning: careful organization of thoughts and ideas.
  • Audience Awareness: considering who will listen or read.
  • Sustained Effort: continuous and focused work on the task.
  • Skill Reliance:
  • Language and literacy skills are crucial (notably challenging for students with DLD, LD).
  • Perspective taking is important (often challenging for students with ASD or pragmatic language impairment).
  • Executive functioning skills required (can be a challenge for students with TBI, ADHD, LD).

Challenges Faced by Students with DLD/LD

• Engagement in the Writing Process:
  • Spend less time on each phase of the writing process:
  • Prewriting
  • Drafting
  • Revising
  • Editing
  • Typically produce shorter texts with:
  • Less information
  • Less elaborate/literary language
  • More spelling and grammatical errors.

Assessing Writing and Speaking

• Standardized Assessments:

  • Examples include the TILLS (Test of Narrative Language).
  • Writing Tasks/Assignments can include:
  • Narratives (biography)
  • Expository texts (book or lab report)
  • Persuasive/Argumentative texts (advertisement, editorial).
  • Other assessments may involve student responses to state assessment prompts and work portfolios.

• Writing Process Assessment:

  • Evaluation of how students approach writing tasks.
  • Teacher inquiry about the types of writing assignments and student methods:
  • Evidence of understanding the writing goal.
  • Appropriate genre/macrostructure selection.
  • Audience knowledge consideration.
  • Use of a planning process to refine thinking.

• Assessing Final Written Products:

  • Scoring Systems:
  • Holistic: overall impression scoring.
  • Primary Trait: criterion-referenced rubrics (scores 0-4/5).
  • Analytic: measures specific writing aspects - microstructure (complex syntax, lexical diversity) and curriculum-based measurement (CBM).

Discourse Analysis

• Microstructure:

  • Focuses on vocabulary, syntax, morphology.

• Macrostructure:

  • Coherence which involves:
  • Genre-specific organization/schema.
  • Story grammar (sequence, enumerative, descriptive, etc.).
  • Cohesion (transitions, pronouns, articles).

Evaluating Written and Spoken Presentations

• Fluency within a timed writing task includes:

  • Words written, words spelled correctly.
  • Correct sequences in spoken presentational tasks (number of words produced, pauses).

• Error Analysis in writing can include aspects such as handwriting quality.

Importance of Writing Intervention

• Engagement Through Relevant Topics:
  • Choose topics that resonate with students:
  • Personal experiences (e.g., field trips).
  • Interests, hobbies, or strong arguments on relevant issues.
  • Aim for a realistic audience beyond school (peers, community).

Meta-learning Strategies in Writing

• Stages of the Writing Process:
  • Planning, Drafting, Revising, and Editing.
  • Teach self-regulation to enable monitoring through each stage of writing.
  • Allow ample time for each phase.

Writing Expository Texts

• Planning: Self-questioning strategies include:

  • Goals and target audience identification.
  • Knowledge gathering about the topic.
  • Information organization and genre consideration.

• Helpful Strategies for Planning:

  • Engage with peers, SLPs, or experts.
  • Use visual organizers to structure thoughts.
  • Review sample texts with relevant structures.

• Drafting Phase: Start with ideas and develop:

  • Simple sentences from ideas.
  • Elaboration through details, examples.
  • Connections between ideas and paragraphs.

• Revising: Peer reviews for clarity and organization, checking:

  • Completeness and relevance of each sentence.
  • Identifying unclear or under-explained sections.

• Editing: Focus on mechanical aspects:

  • Visual layout inspections, reading aloud for error detection.
  • Separate proofreading for spelling, punctuation, grammar.

Cohesion in Writing Interventions

• Practice using pronouns:

  • Identify and clarify referents in texts.

• Conjunction practice:

  • Combining simple sentences and using conjunctions effectively.
  • Exercises can include identifying and improving choppy sentences in student writing.