1.1 Language Performance

New Zealand schooling calls constantly on children to use language, both oral and written, to explore ideas, convey feelings, impart information and share experiences. In order to engage effectively with the tasks of learning, students need to develop their expertise and skill across both oral and written language performance. These two modes of communication are clearly distinctive in function and in character. Spoken language is immediate, informal, and has an important non-verbal aspect. By contrast, written language takes form at a pace that need have no relation to the temporal requirements for reading or thus receiving it. Writing is almost inevitably more formal than speech, and must convey its meaning quite in the absence of non-verbal cues. Distinctive though these two forms of language use may be, they are, however, surely not unrelated. Both modes of self-expression are vital aspects of communication or discourse. To master the language fully, a student must develop an ability to communicate well both orally and in writing.

In an environment meant to elicit development of a student’s powers for both oral and written self-expression, how possible is it to become good at one yet not at the other? And if there is a connection between skill development in the one mode with that in the other, which way does the connection run? Do the skills of speaking/listening transfer to skills of writing? Or does development of skills of crafting written sentences advance a student’s skills of speaking and listening? Might both be the case? How strong or weak a correlation might we expect there to be between students’ level of performance orally and their level of performance in written language tasks? The present study will not be able to answer all these questions. However, it will attempt to establish whether a significant relationship exists between students’ oral and written language competence, or if these are in fact quite separate domains. It will also investigate whether or not there are significant differences in the strength of this relationship depending on students’ year level, gender, ethnicity or the decile level of their school.

Not all language users write. Indeed there are whole languages with no written form, and that was indeed how all languages have been for most of the time that humans have been on this earth. In both historical terms and in terms of a child’s development, talk comes before writing. This leads many people to think that the purpose of writing is to capture, in a different way, what can be said. Yet clearly our language would not be the same had writing never existed. There are enormous differences between the languages of peoples who have no writing, and the languages of literate cultures. So when a child learns both oral and written forms of self-expression, it is not completely clear that the latter set of skills is subservient to the former set. On the contrary, there may be much for the child to learn from the practice of writing about how, in a literate culture, to talk.

Yet the allure of the opposite conception is very strong. While humans have been speaking for around a million years, there has been writing for only about six thousand years, and really only fora few recent decades during which humankind has significantly aimed for universal literacy and thus a universal ability to write. The majority of languages that there have ever been, including a number still extant, possess a spoken but not a written form. Thus it is easy to suppose that spoken language has primacy over written language. Accordingly, many people believe that speech is “natural” in a way that writing is not, and that there are many important differences between speech and writing:

Speech is as fundamental a part of being human as walking upright, but writing is an optional extra – exclusive to human beings, certainly, but not a defining characteristic of the species.
(Romaine, 1984 The Language of Children and Adolescents, p. 24.)

A quite different case can, however, be put. Vygotsky (1962, 1978) argues that because the act of writing is more deliberate than speaking, it may be that it is in writing that children learn to exercise control and thereby become more adept at being able to say what they mean.
Of course, what the child can mean by what the child might say depends on the qualities of the language being spoken. A language that can be written will typically possess a richness of terms and a facility for a “literal” kind of precision of self-expression that is significantly different from that in the languages of peoples whose cultures are entirely oral.
Vygotsky also argues that, because writing is a second-order representation, there are many important differences between writing and the spoken word. Wood (1988) also develops this idea:

Externalising our ideas, imaginings, thoughts and feelings in such a way that they are put into a verbal context, sequenced in an understandable way and expressed unambiguously in a written medium is not a simple extension of what we do when we participate in conversations.
(Wood, 1988 How Children Think and Learn, p. 163.)

However, even if we accept that speaking and writing are clearly quite separate in terms of both form and content, there may nevertheless be interesting things to learn about student performance across the two domains of speaking and writing. The nature of language proficiency across the two domains might still be significantly intertwined.

1.3 Oral versus Literate Expertise

Students acquire much of their oral language expertise without formal teaching. Thus, for example, they arrive at school already significantly able to communicate orally. This contrasts with the formal way in which written language is taught over the primary school years. A great deal of time is spent during the first eight years of school inculcating and developing skills of writing. But although these two modes appear to be learned in quite different ways, are they in fact completely separate? As students progress through primary school, are there clues in their oral language performance of growing competency and expertise in written language? If students' early writing grows out of their oral language development, might we not expect that what have learned about writing will start to flow back into their speech as they progress through the primary school years? These are complex issues. While most teachers assume that student language competence grows continuously rather than by discrete jumps, and that what induces it to grow is a complex blend of reading, writing, and oral language experiences, there may nonetheless be some quite specific yet telling clues or indicators of that emerging mastery in students' speech and writing. The aim of this study is to explore whether developing sophistication in student writing might be seen to anticipate (or reflect), growing oral language development. It will also consider whether or to what extent emerging expertise in written language might contribute to students' overall mastery of language performance, both oral and literate.

(b) Sample
The sample for this probe study was made up of a subsection of the 2002 NEMP national sample. 130 students (66 males and 64 females) were randomly selected from each year group. This population contained 33 males and 31 females at Year 4, and 32 males and 34 females at Year 8. This information, plus additional NEMP-gathered demographic material, allowed a detailed examination of student performance across year group, gender, ethnicity, decile band and geographic location.

NOTE: Data were used in this study under the assumption that the students would fully manifest, through task performance, what they were able to do. There is, however, in fact some reason to distinguish between actual performance and possible competence: some students may have been nervous or disinclined to perform, for a host of reasons that this study did not control for. Therefore their performance might not reflect their actual competence in another context.

(c) Task Description
Identifying the qualities of an effective language user across a range of aspects both oral and written, is not easy to achieve, let alone measure. As with adults, students' speech is often ungrammatical and characterised by false starts and hesitations, as well as a high degree of redundancy. Informal speech also relies on a host of complex performance features, and this makes analysis highly complex. The overriding purpose in this study was to examine students' speaking and writing skills in terms of overall effectiveness of communication.

The study does not aim to analyse in close detail either linguistically or grammatically, the underlying structures of either speech or writing. It was with this emphasis on the use of language for effective communication that tasks were examined and analysed in detail. In total, four language tasks were analysed for this study (3 writing tasks and 1 “viewing” task). (See NEMP Report 25 for more information on viewing task “It's Cool to Read”, and NEMP Report 27 for more information on Link Task 2, Link Task 14, and the student writing survey.)

1.4.1 Task Description
The viewing task used for the oral language analysis was called “It's Cool to Read”. This task, delivered through a video-taped interview with a Teacher Administrator, required the student to select from a visual array of nine black and white photographs, two that they considered particularly suitable for a poster to promote reading. No prior knowledge was required for this task and the pictures were quite varied. The interview was structured so that students were posed a closed sentence followed by an open question, to explain each of their two picture choices. Students were subsequently asked to identify the picture they considered least suitable for their poster, and to say why. This task took place towards the end of an hour-long session that covered a range of language activities.

Analysis of student writing skills was based on an extended recount that students completed over three successive writing sessions. The topic of the recount was an experience, event or memory that had had significant and lasting impact. This topic was accessible to students across both age and gender. It called for writing that was personal rather than formal in tone and it invited a range of approaches in terms of structure and style.

Student performance in each of these areas was coded, in accordance with the study's purpose. During the coding process however, oral and written language performances were considered quite separately in order to keep coding free from bias. Coding was done in alternating batches of eight for each Year group, in order to prevent biasing from any kind of drift during the coding work.