For the majority of students in this study, growing written language expertise was related to growing mastery and confidence in spoken language. Writing accomplishment was to some degree linked to developing spoken language skills. This is not to suggest that the relationship between oral and written language is necessarily simple or direct or that spoken language “maps” onto written language in any simple or direct way. What was evident from this study was that the more confident and competent writers in the study demonstrated knowledge of specifically literate strategies and structures in their writing. Students who were more skilled in handling the demands of oral language also appeared more likely to demonstrate sophistication and maturity in their writing. Less confident oral students also appeared not to have such a repertoire of written forms and strategies to draw upon. These students appeared unaware of the difference between conversational exchanges and written language, and of the different language strategies appropriate to each medium. They seemed unaware of the fact that both speakers and writers must use the tools appropriate to the medium to guide the reader's response. Information gathered here suggests that that communicative competence continues to grow and develop during the middle and late primary school years. While knowledge of “taught” grammatical features related positively to overall writing performance, the study could not determine the degree to which increased writing competence is maturational as opposed to being consequent on something that has been directly taught. (Information gathered in this study was based on the assumption that students would show, through task performance, what they were able to do. There is however a need 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 competence in another context.)

While all of the students in the sample had some degree of mastery over both spoken and written forms, the degree of proficiency in their performances varied greatly. Some students appeared to have an almost effortless language fluency in both spoken and written forms whereas others appeared to face obstacles of varying proportions, usually across both domains. This study evidenced that the more confident and competent writers demonstrated knowledge of specifically literate strategies and structures in their writing.

High oral language performers engaged with and related well to both their audience and their subject matter. They exploited the tools of oral language to make their communication effective. Fluent speakers were identified as those who used reasoning and justifications in their responses. They used the tools of oral language to carry their message. In the course of explaining their thoughts, these students showed some evidence of a tolerance for ambiguity, a concession that things might not be quite as they seem, and that they needed to give evidence to support their views although, as was noted in Section 2, the ability to weigh and communicate a fully developed point of view was not identified as a strength at either year level. Less competent speakers appeared not to have a sense of their audience's needs. Their responses were brief and sometimes terse. A common area for further development across both speaking and writing performances could be to further develop skills of relating to the audience, whether present or absent.

Students who were more skilled in handling the demands of oral language also appeared more likely to demonstrate sophistication and maturity in their writing. Effective writing requires a whole raft of learned skills. It is not simply speech written down. Yet many students, even at Year 8, demonstrated that they were still learning what speech and writing can and cannot do. Consequently, as we have seen, there was sometimes a mismatch between oral and literate strategies in their writing. As was shown in Section 3, some students appeared to be directly importing patterns of oral language construction into their written prose. Their writing relied heavily on techniques such as reiteration, repetition, and multiple clauses linked by conjunctions. Connective words such as “and”, “then”, “so”, “but”, “next”, “later” were over-used. Overall these students appeared to be writing without anticipating the effects of their writing choices on their readers.

By contrast, more practiced writers showed they could shape and craft their writing with an overall sense of purpose, and yet without having to include every last detail. This group of students were starting to choose grammatical structures to carry the weight and impact of their ideas. They were able to link sentences and connect related ideas. Their writing had a distinctively personal voice. Overall these findings underline reasons for the very real challenge that writing represents for some students, for without a sense of the fundamental difference between speech and writing, and the different skills that each of these requires, some writers struggled to make their writing engaging. They appeared not to have a repertoire of writing strategies to draw upon. Possible reasons for this are many. While some of these “literate” skills and strategies may have been learned through direct teacher instruction, overall experience with written language in a range of contexts, including reading, is likely to play a part in the development of student overall language expertise.

High-performing students at both year levels showed evidence in their writing of linguistic constructions not found in spontaneous speech (though sometimes used in more formal speech situations). This suggests that there are important influences on these children's writing development other than oral language. It is probable that reading is the most likely source of these more complex linguistic constructions. It would seem likely that the more children read material that is enjoyable, complex and thoughtful in construction, the greater the chance becomes that these structures will start to appear in their own writing. Perera (1984, p. 244) notes that the linguistic patterns that are characteristic of written language are simply not to be found in spontaneous oral forms: