Browsing by Author "Hugo, Evelyn"

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    Development of syntactic complexity in narrative and explicative texts written by high school students
    (University of Chile, 2016) Aravena, Soledad; Hugo, Evelyn
    The study aimed to know how some syntactic complexity resources are manifested in narrative and explicative texts written by students from three school levels and two socioeconomic groups. 240 texts were analysed using measures of productivity, syntactic density and connectivity, which were labelled with CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis, CHILDES Project). The results show that both the socioeconomic factor and age group/grade level impact significantly in productivity (number of clause-packages, CP), syntactic density (number of clauses per CP) and connectivity (types of interclausal relationships). Also, the discourse genre is revealed as a significant factor in connectivity, as explicative texts meet the highest proportion of interclausal complex relationships, particularly hypotaxis. The findings reaffirm the important role of syntax in developing writing skills, command of genres and late language development in general.
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    Written metalinguistic reflections of 4(th) graders on scientific explanations: A bridge between conceptual, discursive, and lexicogrammatical dimensions
    (ELSEVIER, 2022) Hugo, Evelyn; Meneses, Alejandra
    Writing disciplinary texts is difficult for upper-elementary students, but it is a core practice for subject learning. A dimension under-explored in disciplinary writing contexts is metalinguistic reflection; however, this could help students attend to the different dimensions of writing, building bridges between them. This study characterizes the metalinguistic reflections of 96 monolingual Spanish-speaking 4th graders on the school scientific explanations genre throughout a pedagogical intervention. It also explores relations between metalinguistic reflections and scientific explanations written by two students. The results showed that the students' reflections changed throughout the learning sequence, since at the beginning, they mainly focused on conceptual aspects, while at the end, they also incorporated discursive notions. The case analysis highlights relations between reflections that integrate multidimensional writing dimensions and high scientific explanation performance. More research is required to understand the relations between the different dimensions of metalinguistic reflection -conceptual, discursive, and lexicogrammatical- and the quality of written texts.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.