'Developmental writing difficulties: assessing writing products and writing processes' Speaker: Professor Julie Dockrell (University of London)

Children with Language Learning Difficulties (LLD) are predominantly educated in mainstream classrooms. They raise challenges for teaching and learning and typically progress more slowly in literacy than their peers. Children with LLD also experience problems when producing written texts and produce texts of lower quality with fewer words and reduced lexical diversity (Connelly et al, 2012; Dockrell et al, 2007, 2009; 2013). The majority of studies of children’s writing focus on the writing product and from this make inferences about the writing process. Using a cohort of pupils with LLD I will report on a study which uses both measures of the writing product and the writing process to explore difficulties with written language. Implications for the development of models of writing and writing interventions will be explored.