The construction of expository text

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the ways in which elementary school children construct an expository text, i.e. a text whose primary objective is to express information and ideas and which is well exemplified in school textbooks. Eighty subjects from grade 2 to 8 were requested to write a text about the wind. The writing task was divided into two main phases: in the first phase each subject dictated his/her ideas to an adult who transcribed them; in the second phase the subject had to write a text using the ideas he/she had expressed. The data showed a developmental trend in expository writing, which concerns particularly three aspects of the written productions: the strategies of content generation used by the subjects, the changes from dictation to text production, and the organization of the final text.