Hidi, S. E., & Hildyard, A. (1983). The comparison of oral and written productions in two discourse types . Discourse Processes , 6 (2), 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638538309544557

Journal Article

Hidi, S. E., & Hildyard, A. (1983). The comparison of oral and written productions in two discourse types. Discourse Processes, 6(2), 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638538309544557

Tags

Audio recording device/software (Response); Dictated response; Dictated response (scribe); Elementary; Individual; Multiple accommodations; No disability; Writing

Summary

Accommodation

Students wrote both an opinion essay and a narrative essay and were randomly assigned to one of two types of response modes for each type of essay: Oral, in which students spoke out their composition (opinion) with no time limit (with individual administration); Written, with students given the opinion essay topic and told to write as much as they could (again, no time limit with group administration).

Participants

Participants in this study included 20 grade 3 students and 23 grade 5 students.

Dependent Variable

Essays were scored for: Semantic well-formedness (rating of 1-5), Cohesion (rating of 1-5), and Number of words produced.

Findings

For both grade levels, children produced better narrative than opinion essays, although no significant differences existed between oral and written essays. On cohesion, the scores on narrative essays were significantly higher than the scores on opinion essays. Fifth graders produced more than third graders. Also, the oral productions had more words than written productions, and opinion essays contained more words than narrative essays.