Production factors for written expository texts
Creators: name: Van Blommestein, Erane
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: Expository text writing is a task that demands high-level cognitive and linguistic skill in order to produce well-written texts. Individuals who have cognitive-communicative impairments following mild closed head injury often display difficulty in organization, recall and attention when writing texts. The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that facilitate production of coherent expository texts by two unimpaired adults, with the ultimate goal of applying the results to work with head-injured individuals. These factors were: type of texts and type of support found in the text elicitation context. It was hypothesized that Description texts would be easiest to produce, followed by Comparison, Sequence, and Response texts. It was also hypothesized that texts that were supported in the elicitation context by explicit information regarding text structure would result in more coherent texts than those written without such support. Furthermore, texts that were supported by structure plus content information were hypothesized to result in texts that were most coherent. Finally, it was questioned whether texts that were produced in the absence of support, but after the two support conditions had been completed, would exhibit a learning effect. Therefore, the effect of four elicitation contexts and four text types were examined. Each subject wrote sixteen texts. Text adequacy was measured using cohesive harmony analysis (Hasan, 1984, 1985) and a reader rating scale that was intended to measure perceived coherence. Results from Subject One were consistent with the hypothesized order of text difficulty. As well, the conditions in which text structure was provided generally resulted in more coherent texts than the texts produced without support. Evidence for a learning effect in the last condition was not found. Because the addition of content did not appear to increase text coherence when compared to texts produced with structural support alone, particularly for easier text types, it was suggested that a ceiling effect may have occurred for this subject, so that additional reduction of processing demands did not result in improved text production. The results from Subject Two were inconclusive, particularly for the effect of elicitation context. Order of text type difficulty differed from the expected order for this subject's texts. This demonstrates the variability that occurs among unimpaired writers in both text coherence and how writing tasks are approached, as well as the need for further studies using larger samples. Text ratings by a group of Speech-Langauge Pathologists did not match the results of the cohesive harmony analysis for text type. It was suggested that this disparity may be due to: inadequacies in cohesive harmony analysis that make it insensitive to features of texts readers use in order to determine coherence; or differences among texts in the readers' ability to construct text structure as they read. Texts produced in contexts with support generally received higher perceived coherence ratings than those written without such support. Inter-rater variability was marked, especially for texts low in cohesive harmony. Modifications to the procedures used in this study for both further research and clinical application are discussed.