Planning and Writing performance in Chinese children

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate whether and how beginning Chinese writers plan before they write, and the relationship between planning and writing performance. The performance of children in Grades 3 and 4 from two primary schools in a planning task was analyzed. Three main strategies of representing their ideas during the planning task were identified, namely, freewriting, drawing and mind-mapping. Although drawing was the most commonly used strategy among the participants, there was clear evidence that more participants chose to use mind maps in Grade 4 than in Grade 3. MANOVA results showed that the main effect of grade (Grade 3 vs Grade 4) and the interaction of grade x strategies (freewriting vs drawing vs mind-mapping) was not significant, but the main effect of strategies was significant. Post-hoc results showed that the group of participants using mind maps in planning performed significantly better than the other groups in overall writing quality, productivity and organization. Preliminary multiple regression analysis results showed that the number of ideas and the complexity of the connections among the ideas were significant predictors of the overall writing quality, productivity and organization after controlling for age and Raven’s scores. These findings reflect the developmental changes, especially the increasing use of mind-mapping, in the planning behaviors of beginning Chinese writers. It also reveals a positive effect of mind-mapping planning strategy on writing performance. This study supports the importance of planning in cognitive models of writing and has educational implications for providing strategy-focused instructions to beginning writers.