Spreken En Schrijven Van Kinderen

The relationship between children's oral and written language use may be considered as one of the main issues in the study of literacy development. In this paper, the focus is on how 10-year-old children (grade 5) create a textual context in oral and written narratives for their recipients. The first aim of this research was to find out what kind of practices children use to contextualize their stories. The second aim was to compare the practices in the oral and written mode, to determine to what extent children at this age still rely on oral language practices in their written texts. A dependent group design was used to make a comparison between the practices in both conditions possible, while in both conditions the same story was retold. Results show that the children were able to contextualize their stories in the oral as well as in the written mode, but that some contextualization practices (such as the avoidance of exophoric references, and the use of dialogue) were more frequently found in the written mode of the stories. Besides, it was found that the sequence of the oral and written task was an important variable, but not in the expected way. The oral texts were influenced by the written texts (greater length, more dialogue, but also more exophoric references); the written texts, however, did not show any influence from the oral texts. The conclusion might be that we have to reconsider the relationship between children's oral and written language use at this age.