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.