Oral and Written Discourse of Basic Writers: Similarities and Differences

Related as they are, speaking and writing are nonetheless distinctly different communicative modes. Of the two, oral language is primary and is acquired in a comparatively functional and natural way. Learning to write is a more formal, less natural endeavor, one which involves the development of a sensitivity to requirements unique to the written mode. Regarded developmentally, the young language learner is said to produce holophrastic speech, one-word utterances which are the semantic equivalents to grammatically complete sentences (McNeill, 1966; Wall, 1974). The child at that stage is highly dependent on non-linguistie elements inherent in the communication situation (Bloom, 1970). The emergence of more elaborate utterances to include specification of a subject is regarded by some researchers as an indication of increased purposefulness and greater awareness of the demands of the given communication situation (Chafe, 1976; Piaget, 1955; Vygotsky, 1962). The degree to which these qualities enter into the communication act becomes a measure of the speaker's linguistic maturity. Typically, beginning writers, accustomed mainly to the oral mode, must learn more firmly rules and conventions of written syntax and orthography, and they must also respond to increased demands for explicit and elaborated information. Additionally, knowledge of how to structure written expression is needed in order to produce effective written discourse. For many young language learners, acquiring these rules and strategies for communicating in the written mode does not represent an easy shift from one mode of communication to another but a difficult transition from one language code with familiar, more naturalseeming rules to another code with rules which are comparatively inflexible, complex and difficult to master. In effect, some student writers, regardless of their chronological age or academic status, may fail to meet the new demands of the written mode. Age and written syntactic complexity may not for them be as highly correlated as it has been generally found to be in language development studies (Loban, 1976; O'Donnell, Griffin & Norris, 1967). A characterization which has been made of such writers is that they tend to write more like they talk than do comparatively more skillful writers (Shaughnessy, 1977). This implies that unpracticed or basic writers, as they are now often called, may be heavily dependent upon their oral