| This dissertation comprised two studies of referential explicitness and coherence in bilingual children's writing. The first study analyzed six elementary-school teachers' think-aloud reading protocols of 48 personal narratives in English, L2, and Spanish by native English-speaking (NE) and Spanish-dominant (SD) 2nd- through 5th-graders in a two-way bilingual program. Prior to the study, textual analysis was used to classify narratives as high or low in explicitness. Protocols were analyzed for the impact of noun-phrase elaborations and misconstraints (incongruence between writers' expressions and readers' interpretations) on teachers' processing and coherence assessments.; Results showed that teachers (a) attended more to misconstraints than to elaborations; (b) cited lexico-semantic misconstraints most frequently; (c) identified proportionally the fewest misconstraints in Spanish and 3rd-grade narratives, and ranked Spanish and 5th-grade narratives highest for coherence; and (d) identified proportionally the most misconstraints in L2 and 2nd-grade narratives, and ranked English and 2nd-grade narratives lowest for coherence. ESL/bilingual teachers cited fewer misconstraints and graded less stringently than mainstream teachers. As a group, teachers overlooked pragmatic misconstraints in attending to language errors. Despite no significant correlations between researcher- and teacher-identified misconstraints, textual analysis proved predictive of teachers' rankings of narratives as high and low in coherence and quality.; The second investigation was a textual analysis of explicitness of reference and information status in 159 narratives in English by NE and SD students. Explicitness measures included felicitous encoding of entities, entity elaborations, and word-order variations that preserved canonical information status. Non-explicit features included grammatical and lexico-semantic errors, ambiguous reference, informational inadequacy, and misassumptions about readers' familiarity with contextual knowledge.; English narratives contained significantly more elaborations, variety in linguistic encoding of elaborations, and word order variations across grades than L2 narratives. They also contained significantly fewer problems in vagueness, although English and L2 narratives were comparable in incidence of other misconstraints. L2 narratives showed greater genre conformity at second grade than those in English, indicating early transfer of rhetorical skills. Results suggest that SD students lacked expressive means for elaborating entities and generating content in written English and that the gap in performance did not narrow at higher grades. |
