Uppeldi og menntun - 01.01.2011, Page 97

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 20 (1) 2011 97
H r a fn H i l d U r r ag n a rS d Ót t i r
Written Language and Literacy. (2002a). Cross-linguistic perspectives on the develop-
ment of text-production abilities in speech and writing. Special Issue. Part I, 5(1)
Written Language and Literacy. (2002b). Cross-linguistic perspectives on the develop-
ment of text-production abilities in speech and writing. Special Issue. Part II, 5(2).
Greinin var send tímaritinu 25. júní 2010 og samþykkt til birtingar 9. febrúar 2011
Um höfUnd
Hrafnhildur Ragnarsdóttir (hragnars@hi.is) er prófessor í þroskasálfræði og sál-
málvísindum við Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands. Hún lauk doktorsprófi í sálfræði
og menntavísindum frá Université d´Aix-Marseille 1990. Rannsóknarsvið hennar er
þróun máls og málnotkunar (tal- og ritmál) frá frumbernsku til fullorðinsára og tengsl
málþroska við aðra þroskaþætti og og læsi.
Text construction by children, adolescents and adults
A comparative study of vocabulary use in narratives versus expository
genre, and in written compared to spoken modality
abstraCt
The general aim of the research project reported on in this article is to study later
language development, in particular the development of text construction proficiency
from middle childhood to adulthood, and to compare different aspects of language
use in narrative versus expository discourse GENRE, in spoken versus written
MODALITY. Participants were eighty Icelandic subjects equally divided between four
gender-balanced age-groups: 11-, 14-, 17-year-olds and adults. All received the same
elicitation task, a short wordless video clip depicting scenes of familiar interpersonal
socio/moral conflicts staged in a school setting. They were then asked to a) recount an
incident from their own lives of the kind shown in the video (narrative), orally and in
writing; and b) discuss problems of this kind (expository), orally and in writing. Each
participant thus produced four texts: an oral and a written narrative, and an oral and
a written expository text. The participants wrote the written texts directly on a com-
puter (except for the youngest group). All texts were transcribed in CHAT format and
coded and analyzed in various ways.
In the present article, the focus is on the use of vocabulary in text construction.
Four different quantitative measures of vocabulary richness were applied: vocabulary
diversity (VocD), lexical and nominal density, and word length (WdLen), which is
an indicator of lexical specificity and use of relatively rare words. The results of a