How to make it easier for children to revise their writing: a study of text revision from 3rd to 5th grades.
BACKGROUND
Writing is considered as a complex activity, involving at least three processes: planning, translating and revising. The experiment proposed here focused on this last process, from a developmental perspective.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to examine if a delay between writing and revising could improve the frequency and the nature of revisions. In two out of three writing sessions the revising period was delayed to lighten the cognitive load associated with the revising process. The main hypothesis was that the revisions would be more frequent in older children's texts and during the sessions in which the revising process was delayed.


METHODS
Sixty children (20 per grade) from 3rd to 5th grades participated in the study.


METHODS
These children were asked to write a text, and to revise it, when the revising phase occurred, whether during the writing phase or afterwards.


RESULTS
The text length, the frequency of errors and the frequency and the nature of revisions were analysed. The main results showed that, surprisingly, 3rd graders produced shorter texts, containing more errors, but revised more than 4th and 5th graders. The two postponed revising conditions led to more revisions than the revision occurring during writing. Surface revisions were more frequent than meaning revisions, but this result was only significant for younger children, or when revision occurred during writing. For all grades and revising conditions, surface revisions were mainly script and spelling corrections; meaning revisions were mainly additions and deletions of words or parts of texts.


CONCLUSIONS
This study shows the effect of children's grade on revision, and that postponing the revising process seems to help children to increase the frequency and the depth of their revisions.
Chanquoy
L
L
Laborataire de Psychologie, University of Nantes, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, BP 81227, 44 312 Nantes, France. lucile.chanquoy@humana.univ-nantes.fr
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D014705:Verbal Behavior