ficance of the
relationships between literacy, language, and written text production
concurrently and over time.
STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN WRITTEN LANGUAGE AT 16
As a group, the participants performed poorly on the total analytic
scale of the WOLD (Wechsler, 1996) with a mean z score of -2.20 (SD =
1.14); this pattern of performance did not vary by gender (girls M =
-2.34, SD = .89; boys M = -2.15, SD = 1.21; t = 0.58, df = 56, ns) or
special and mainstream settings (mainstream M = -2.00, SD = 1.21;
special M = -2.50, SD = .98; t = 1.6 df = 56, ns). As such, all further
analyses treat the participants as one group.
Performance on the written language measure was significantly
poorer than the students' nonverbal ability scores (t = 9.12, df =
56, p < .0005, Cohen's d = 1.31). We examined the extent to
which performance in writing was commensurate with language and literacy
assessments through a series of repeated measures ANOVAs. Performance on
the written language measure was poorer than performance on the oral
language measures, F(3, 168) = 51.89,p < .0005, [eta][p.sup.2] = .48.
Post hoc comparisons, adjusting for multiple comparisons, indicated that
performance on the written language measure was significantly poorer
than both vocabulary and listening to paragraphs (p < .0005), but did
not differ significantly from the expressive language measure, recalling
sentences. We also considered the literacy measures of spelling, reading
decoding, and reading comprehension in relation to writing. There was a
significant effect of literacy measure, F(3, 159) = 8.336, p < .0005,
[eta][p.sup.2] = .14. Post hoc comparisons adjusting for multiple
comparisons indicated that performance on the written language measure
was significantly poorer than spelling (p = .001), reading decoding (p =
.005), and reading comprehension (p < .0005). Participants thus
experienced significant difficulties in the production of written text;
the degree of impairment for writing, as measured by norm-referenced
tests, was significantly greater than their difficulties with receptive
oral language and other aspects of literacy.
We examined written texts in terms of text length, writing time,
and spelling errors. Participants produced short texts; the mean length
of texts produced was 86 words (range 12-182). Of the 15 min allocated
for the task, participants wrote for an average of 10 min (range 2-15).
There were high and statistically significant relationships between text
length and writing time (r = .55, p < .0005) and between text length
and the WOLD (Wechsler, 1996) z score (r = .66, p < .0005). On
average, participants produced 9 words per minute (SD = 4.5). Spelling
errors in the text were frequent (M = 5.5, 3D) = 4.2; range 0-17) but
there were no significant correlations between the numbers of spelling
errors and the numbers of words written (r = -.10, ns) or WOLD total
score (r = .04, ns).
Participants produced a mean rate of 53.75 (SD = 27.61) letters per
minute for the handwriting fluency measure. The mean number of letters
per minute produced was equivalent to that of children between 8 and 9
years old (Grade 3 M = 47.3; Grade 4 M = 63.26; Graham, Berninger,
Weintraub, & Schafer, 1998). Handwriting fluency at 16 years was
significantly and positively correlated (r = .54, p = .002) concurrently
with the WOLD reading and spelling z scores, and at 14 with the reading,
spelling, and nonverbal ability z scores. Writing fluency was
significantly correlated with both the numbers of words written (r =
.54, p < .0005) and WOLD z score (r = .42, p < .0005), but there
was no relationship with the numbers of spelling errors produced (r = .
Analytic Scores. To identify specific patterns of difficulties, we
examined the analytic scores of WOLD (Wechsler, 1996) subtests. The best
performances were on measures of grammar (M = 1.71, SD = .88) and
capitalization (M = 1.67, SD = .85), "although both means were
still at the lower end of the scale. The poorest performance was on the
measure of sentence structure (m = 1.45, SD = .73), a score indicative
of poor sentenc