Writing Skills in 1st to 2nd Graders with Language Difficulties, Typical Development, and Dyslexia with/without Language Difficulties

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of writing ability and writing related variables such as executive functioning (syntactic ability, sentence construction, planning ability) and working memory. Additionally, this study tried to find out the variables that can discriminate between the four groups. Methods: Fourteen 1st to 2nd graders in each group (dyslexia (DY), dyslexia with language difficulty (LRD), language difficulty without dyslexia (LD), and typical development (TD)) participated in four writing tasks and four writing related tasks. Results: First, there were three performance groups in word writing and sentence writing (TD>LD>DY=LRD), while there were two different groups were observed in short text writing and handwriting (TD=LD>DY=LRD). Secondly, there were three performance groups in syntactic skills and sentence construction (TD>DY>LD=LRD) and in planning skills (TD>DY=LD>LRD), while there were two performance groups in copying (TD=LD>DY=LRD). Thirdly, discriminant analysis showed a 94.6% hit ratio; and word writing, syntactic ability, sentence construction, and sentence writing were good discriminators for the four groups. Conclusion: This study was meaningful in including four groups of children considering language and decoding abilities. For 1st to 2nd graders, sentence writing and word writing assessment and intervention considering executive functions seem to play the key role for each student’s school adaptation with language and/or reading difficulties