Literacy-Related Abilities’ Effects on Argumentative Text Quality Structure

Abstract

Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were analyzed, as well the different text structure quality of children’s argumentative texts. The results indicate that that both literacy ability and text structure quality increase with age. However, not all the increases in the different literacy abilities are significant. Text structure quality—a measure of text organization and ideation—becomes more sophisticated and complete with age, attaining high-quality text structure in fourth and fifth grades in the production of autonomous texts with genre-driven elaborate features. The predictive power of the different literacy abilities to sustain a better-structured text varies across ages.