Developing Novel Approaches to Analyzing Vocabulary, Syntax, and Discourse Structure in Fifth-to-Eighth Grade Argumentative Writing

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three studies on adolescents’ argumentative writing. Standards, assessments, and most research in the field of adolescent writing development rely primarily on holistic rubrics to analyze students’ written language. Evaluation of the major linguistic domains that contribute to effective writing, such as vocabulary, syntax, and discourse structure, is often incorporated only implicitly. At the same time, the latest U.S. national writing assessment results reported that as many as 72% of fourth graders and 76% of eighth graders did not reach the proficient level in argumentative writing (NAEP, 2011). Thus, understanding argumentative writing in greater detail is needed to advance theory and to inform instructional approaches that support writing development. To better describe the language characteristics of adolescents’ written arguments, in this dissertation I present newly developed approaches to measuring three domains, vocabulary (Study 1), syntax (Study 2), and discourse structure (Study 3), using a database of argumentative essays written by a cross-sectional sample of fifth o eighth graders (N = 512) from urban public school districts in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. In Study 1, I generated the Vocabulary in Writing (VW) latent construct from five indicators selected from writing development and corpus linguistics literatures: lexical diversity, lexical density, lexical specificity, lexical rarity, and academic vocabulary. In Study 2, I developed the Diversity of Advanced Syntactic Structures (DASS) index to capture the variability in academic syntactic structures in adolescents’ essays. In Study 3, I present the Argumentation Complexity Scale (ACS) developed on the basis of a qualitative coding scheme to identify key elements of written argumentative discourse. As evidence for the validity of each new approach, analyses in each study showed that participants’ scores in each measure (i.e., VW, DASS, ASC) were positively associated with grade and were predictive of writing quality (measured following the traditional method of assessing it via a holistic rubric). The three studies together reveal the importance of examining fine-grained language skills in order to understand developmental trends and individual differences in adolescent writing. The findings provide insightful empirical evidence to inform more specific learning objectives, assessments, and pedagogy for emerging academic writers.