Written production in primary education: narrative analysis of students in Chilean public schools

Abstract

The study is aimed at understanding and describing the production of written narratives according to the criteria of coherence, cohesion, textual organization, development of ideas, and adequacy to the stimulus instruction. It is intended to describe the most common difficulties and errors in a sample of 414 texts produced by 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th grade children studying at public (state) schools in low socioeconomic status districts. The texts were evaluated through rubrics developed and validated during the study. Results suggest that students can produce a global meaning in their narratives but have a small repertoire of connectors and co-referential devices for their schooling level. They also reveal that students have internalized a basic narrative structure, although their resolutions are mostly inadequate. The development of detailed ideas with a precise lexicon improves when the total number of words written increases, with females performing better than males in this aspect.