The aim of this case study is to understand the connections between process factors of writing, such as bursts and fluency/speed, and product factors related to linguistic complexity and the quality of the final text. With this purpose, we conducted a (pilot) study with 13 developing writers in Basque from the second year of Primary School in two periods to compare their progress in writing. The analysis of the process factors was based on bursts’ measures and pauses duration thanks to the use of HandSpy, a tool that allows one to observe handwriting in real-time. We also analyzed the transcription phase by aggregating a linguistic classification at both sentence- and word-levels while taking into account all the letter revisions that the child attempted. The text was enriched automatically with POS, lemmas, and chunks, as basic syntactic structures. Afterwards, two linguists manually checked all this information following the double-blind method. Thus, the tool automatically analyzed the bursts and fluency, but the complexity and quality of the texts produced were manually coded.
A cursory analysis of our data points to a link between the length of the bursts and the child's fluency, on the one hand, and the complexity /quality of the text produced, on the other. The overall study is a valuable contribution for education practitioners to encourage them to consider not only the product but also the entire process of writing to address the needs of a wide diversity of learners and design new forms of feedback when teaching writing.

Authors:
Jose Mari Arriola, UPV/EHU University of the Basque Country, Spain
Mikel Iruskieta, UPV/EHU University of the Basque Country, Spain
Irune Ibarra, UPV/EHU University of the Basque Country, Spain
Asunción Martínez, UPV/EHU University of the Basque Country, Spain

About the Presenter(s)
Jose Mari Arriola holds a Basque Philology degree (UPV/EHU) and a Master on Computational Linguistics (UB). Member of the IXA Research Group and HITZ Institute. He is professor at the Faculty of Computer Science (UPV/EHU).

Mikel Iruskieta holds a Basque Philology degree and a PhD on Applied Linguistics (UPV/EHU). Member of the IXA Research Group and HITZ Institute. He is professor at the Faculty of Education (UPV/EHU).
http://ixa.si.ehu.es/node/1394/74

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