iculum often involves simplifying activities (Dockrell &
Lindsay, 2007). Government initiatives to improve skills at this stage
have not been successful, with less able children being left behind and
catch-up classes for those who struggled in primary school failing to
bring students up to the expected standard (Ofsted). Typically these
interventions focus on word reading and are provided for most students
aged 12 to 14. Thus, given evidence from both the school reports for
these students (Dockrell, Lindsay, Palikara, et al., 2007) and the
current educational context, it is unlikely that students with SLI are
receiving the support they require to develop their writing skills. A
lack of appropriate interventions and support resources further
disadvantages these struggling writers. This lack of support has been
highlighted in other educational systems (see Moni et al., 2007; Troia
& Maddox, 2004).
Investigations of written language are complex and subject to a
number of limitations. The current study is limited by the small sample,
the use of a single writing measure, and the lack of information on the
children's wider information processing skills. Given the purported
importance of vocabulary a more detailed examination of the
students' competence in this area is needed. It is not clear the
extent to which the vocabulary measure is tapping the breadth of the
children's knowledge, the depth of their semantic representations,
or the efficiency of lexical retrieval. There is increasing evidence
that measures of depth and breadth of vocabulary may have differential
effects on reading, and we expect similar patterns to be evident in
writing (see, e.g., Ouellette, 2006; Tannenbaum et al., 2006). Future
work should pay specific attention to the nature of the evidence for
interventions provided to support writing, including the skills that
underpin performance in writing and the strategies provided for
coordination of these skills.
Care also needs to be taken in generalizing performance on our
writing task. The decline in writing scores could be explained by a lack
of emphasis on this kind of writing in secondary school. Studies of more
complex writing tasks demanded by the secondary school system might lead
to fewer problems. However, the very poor level of the
participants' performance on English exams suggests that this is
unlikely to be the case (Dockrell, Lindsay, Palikara, et al., 2007).
Although the data suggest widespread failure with writing tasks in
relation to peers, the importance of examining writing profiles and
predictors of writing performance across genres remains an important
avenue of further research.
The current study highlights the importance of phonological and
nonphonological dimensions of oral language as important factors in
supporting (or limiting) the production of written text. In addition, we
identified writing fluency as a particular problem for these students.
Further automating the processes involved in transcription is an
important consideration; a recent UK-based intervention to improve the
spelling of subject-specific words by students with dyslexia (Sterling,
Ertubey, Brownfield, O'Reilly, & Noyce, 2004) seems a step in
the right direction. Other schemes that have been used successfully with
other children-those that do not advocate lower-level writing
instruction at the expense of higher-level writing skills--could also be
potentially adapted for use with students with SLI (see Berninger et
al., 1997). We have shown that the writing produced by these students is
directly related to literacy level; schemes to improve literacy levels,
particularly spelling, should also have a long-term benefit provided
they are embedded within interventions that support the coordination of
text production and meaning generation.
In addition, there is a need to consider the vocabulary that these
students possess to support idea generation. Previously we have argued
that the development of semantic skills may be seen as a compensatory
mechanism to support the writing instruction for students with SLI
(Dockrell, L