nge. Studies of the
writing skills of students with SLI have failed to examine developmental
changes. Important gaps remain in our understanding of the writing
profiles of children with SLI and the factors that underpin difficulties
in text production. Specifically, evidence examining the writing
performance of adolescents with a history of SLI is missing and the ways
in which earlier language and literacy skills contribute to the
development of text production over time is unexplored. A further major
omission, given the motor incoordination difficulties experienced by
many children with SLI (Hill, 2004), is the lack of measures of
handwriting fluency. Transcription skills uniquely predict compositional
fluency throughout the elementary grades (Graham, Berninger, Abbott,
Abbott, & Whitaker, 1997) and motor incoordination can impact
handwriting fluency (Graham, Struck, Richardson, & Berninger, 2006);
students with a history of SLI may be disadvantaged in written text
production by transcription skills, their semantic competence, and their
The current study aimed to address the ways in which measures of
language, literacy, and processing limitations are related to writing,
by studying a sample of adolescents with a history of SLI. No
longitudinal data about the writing skills of students with SLI at this
phase of education have previously been published. We predicted that,
similar to other groups of children with learning disabilities, students
with a history of SLI would continue to exhibit difficulties in
producing written text in late adolescence. Given the processing demands
of producing written text, performance would be differentially impaired
in relation to oral language and reading. We expected their texts to be
short and marred by both spelling and grammatical errors. Some relative
growth in writing skills might be possible, given that previous studies
have found a relative improvement in the production of written story
composition towards the end of elementary school (Fey et al., 2004).
This slow growth may continue into the secondary school years. However,
we predicted that performance would be influenced both by previous
levels of written language and by concurrent language abilities, as well
as limitations in transcription skills. In addition, the relationships
between oral language and reading (Wise et al., 2007) led us to predict
that over time students' writing performance would be mediated by
their levels of reading.
To test these predictions, a cohort of adolescents that had been
identified with SLI at 8 years 3 months (and followed for the subsequent
8 years) completed a battery of language and literacy tests, cognitive
measures, and a handwriting fluency measure at age 16. We assessed
writing skill through the analytic scoring scale for the writing measure
of the Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD; Wechsler, 1996;
Rust, 1996) and computed measures of text length given the relationships
between text length and quality for elementary school students (Gansle,
Noell, VanDerHeyden, Naquin, & Slider, 2002; Graham et al., 1997).
We predicted that limited expressive language would reduce text length
and thereby reduce the performance of older students with a history of
SLI. We used hierarchical regression and path analysis to examine the
pattern of relationships among language, literacy, and writing measures
both concurrently and over time to produce a model of the factors
supporting text production.
Following a survey of educational provision in two local education
authorities (LEAs) in the United Kingdom, our research team asked
professionals (speech and language therapists, educational
psychologists, and special educational needs coordinators) to identify
children at age 8 who had a discrepancy between their level of
functioning in the area of speech and language and that which would be
expected given the child's functioning in other areas, and who were
also experiencing significant language-based learning needs. This
process identified a total of 133 children (Dockrell & Lindsay,
2000), from which