Intraindividual differences in levels of language in intermediate grade writers: Implications for the translating process

In contrast to much research on writing acquisition that has focused on interindividual differences among children by comparing good and poor writers at the extremes of the distribution of writing ability, this research focused on intraindividual differences within children along the continuum of writing ability. Advanced planning, on-line planning, translating, and posttranslation reviewing/revising tasks were given to 16 fourth, 16 fifth, and 16 sixth graders. Intraindividual differences occurred in the planning tasks and in levels of language at the word, sentence, and text levels on the translating and revising tasks. Neither individual differences in planning nor metacognitive understanding of translating was related to quality of translating. Verbal working memory generation but not verbal working memory-recall was correlated with the translating task and the reviewing/revising task at the text level. We concluded that intraindividual differences in levels of language and verbal working memory generation should be taken into account in modeling the translating process of developing writers.