Insight into writing development is an important prerequisite for the development of effective writing education. Especially the development of the process of translating ideas into written language is underresearched. The few studies conducted among secondary school students have revealed that written language development in secondary education is characterized by an increase of the rhetorical appropriateness of the language. Surprisingly, this has not seemed to result in the production of texts which more closely resemble genre's typical form (cf. Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2004, 2007).
In this paper, we suggest that this is a consequence of studying the language use in complete texts instead of in each discourse unit devoted to the realization of one communicative goal - a move - separately. By means of the stylistic analysis method of Stukker and Verhagen (2019), we analyzed the linguistic expressions students in Grade 7, 9 and 11 of academic secondary education and professionals use to realize the moves of the genre 'book review', i.e. informing the reader about the book and its author, evaluating the book and possibly recommending to read or not read it.
This analysis revealed that the development to deploy language rhetorically efficiently does lead to the production of texts which resemble genre's typical form more closely. Secondary school students in higher grades tend to realize the genre goals linguistically in a more expert-like way by describing more elaborately the story setting in the summary of the book and providing their opinion less explicitly.
In this paper, we will present our method of analysis and analysis results, and discuss how our stylistic description of the written language in student and expert texts of the same genre can be made relevant for teaching and learning in order to help students improve their written language and increase their meaning-making potentials.
References:
Berman, R. A., & Nir-Sagiv, B. (2004). Linguistic indicators of inter-genre differentiation in later language development. Journal of Child Language, 31(2), 339.
Berman, R. A., & Nir-Sagiv, B. (2007). Comparing narrative and expository text construction across adolescence: A developmental paradox. Discourse Processes, 43(2), 79-120.
Stukker, N., & Verhagen, A. (2019). Stijl, taal en tekst: Stilistiek op taalkundige basis [Style, language and text: Stylistics in a linguistic manner]. Leiden University Press.
