Lexical standards for expository writing at Grade 3:The transition from early literacy to academic literacy

Abstract

This article reports on an investigation of vocabulary thresholds across four standards of writing quality for grade 3 children. An expository prompt was used to elicit first draft writing from 222 students. A quota sampling strategy was used to create a learner corpus of 80 papers. Online lexical profiling tools were used to generate indices of lexical richness. Distinct differences in vocabulary use were noted between quality standards, in particular the ability to access low frequency words among the samples judged of excellent quality. Pedagogical implications emerge for classroom practitioners to address the language learning needs of linguistically vulnerable youngsters.Key words: expository prose, writing, transitional literacy, vocabulary profiling