Written Language and Composition Skills Flashcards

A CALT analyzes writing samples from a student with developmental language disorder (DLD) and calculates both T-units and C-units. In which specific scenario would the C-unit count EXCEED the T-unit count for the same writing sample?

Answer: When the student produces contextually acceptable sentence fragments that lack a subject-verb structure

C-units (communication units) include both T-units (main clause + all subordinate clauses) AND incomplete but contextually acceptable utterances — such as elliptical responses or fragments. T-units require a subject and finite verb. When a student produces acceptable fragments (e.g., answers to implicit questions), these are counted as C-units but not T-units, causing C-unit totals to exceed T-unit totals. The other scenarios do not create that discrepancy.

According to Berninger and Amtmann's Simple View of Writing, a student demonstrates vivid oral storytelling and strong verbal idea generation but produces written compositions that are extremely brief, poorly spelled, and labored. Executive functions are measured as age-appropriate. Which profile BEST accounts for this pattern?

Answer: Isolated transcription deficit — impaired handwriting and spelling with intact higher-order writing processes

The Simple View of Writing separates transcription (spelling + handwriting), executive functions (working memory, self-regulation), and text generation (ideation). A student with age-appropriate executive functions and rich oral ideas but severely impaired written output most precisely fits an isolated transcription deficit — the 'bottleneck' is at the point of encoding, not at the idea-generation or regulatory level. If executive functions were also impaired, planning and revision would also be compromised.

A CALT is evaluating the cohesion quality of a student's persuasive essay. The student writes: 'Students should have recess. Moreover, it improves focus. In addition, exercise is beneficial. Furthermore, physical activity reduces stress.' This pattern MOST specifically indicates which cohesion deficit?

Answer: Overreliance on additive conjunctive cohesion with absence of causal, adversative, and temporal connectives

Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy of cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Conjunction cohesion is further divided into additive (moreover, in addition), adversative (however, yet), causal (therefore, because), and temporal (then, finally) types. This student uses additive connectives exclusively — a hallmark of immature cohesion where the writer strings ideas together without expressing logical relationships between them. The pronouns and lexical chains in the passage are not the primary deficit.

When teaching advanced spellers about morphophonological spelling, a CALT explains why 'malign' retains a silent ⟨gn⟩ even though the /g/ is not pronounced — yet in the related form 'malignant,' the /g/ is audible. The MOST accurate principle underlying this orthographic pattern is:

Answer: Morphological constancy — English orthography preserves the visual identity of morphemes across derivational and inflectional changes, even when surface pronunciation shifts

Morphological constancy (also called the morphophonological principle) holds that English spelling preserves the base morpheme's visual form across derived words, even when pronunciation changes. The ⟨gn⟩ in 'malign' is preserved because it is identical to the ⟨gn⟩ that surfaces phonologically in 'malignant,' 'malignancy,' etc. This principle — not orthographic depth per se, analogy, or a discrete exception rule — is the clinically actionable explanation that empowers students to see the spelling as systematic rather than arbitrary.

In the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model developed by Harris and Graham, a student can recite the steps of the POW+TREE strategy from memory but still requires teacher-provided cue cards and corrective feedback during independent drafting. At which SRSD stage is this student operating?

Answer: Support It — the student has memorized the strategy but still requires scaffolded assistance during application

The six SRSD stages progress from Develop Background Knowledge → Discuss It → Model It → Memorize It → Support It → Independent Performance. A student who can recite strategy steps (memory criterion met) but still relies on scaffolding during writing is in the Support It stage, where the teacher gradually fades prompts, cues, and corrective feedback. The Memorize It stage is already complete once the student can recite steps fluently. Independent Performance requires no external support at all.

A CALT is scoring a 4th-grade student's written narrative using a curriculum-based measure of writing (CBM-W). The evaluator counts correct word sequences (CWS) and incorrect word sequences (IWS) rather than simply tallying words written correctly. What is the PRIMARY psychometric advantage of using the CWS:IWS ratio over a simple correct-words-per-minute (CWPM) metric?

Answer: CWS captures both spelling accuracy and syntactic acceptability within a single index, providing sensitivity to discourse-level production errors that isolated word-level metrics miss

A correct word sequence (CWS) is a pair of adjacent correctly spelled words that are also syntactically and semantically acceptable in context (e.g., 'the dog' = 1 CWS; 'the runed' = 0 CWS). This means CWS is simultaneously sensitive to spelling accuracy, word choice, morphosyntax, and local sentence-level coherence — deficits that a simple count of correctly spelled individual words would miss entirely. A student could misspell nothing but produce syntactically broken output and score zero CWS, whereas CWPM would credit each correctly spelled word regardless of syntactic context.