Mid-adolescence is a period of considerable potential growth in the language for academic writing. Yet, to date, few writing studies explore language development during this period and even fewer focus on longitudinal or diverse samples. In this study, we examined the development of language skills for academic writing in a socio-economically diverse sample followed from sixth to seventh grade (n = 124). In each grade, participants wrote summaries of a science text. Subsequently, summaries were scored for writing quality (WQ) and analyzed for productive language skills (lexico-syntactic and discourse features). Participants completed a receptive academic language assessment and a test that measured reading comprehension of the source text. First, we examined if WQ or productive language skills changed over time. Next, we tested if Grade 6 productive and receptive language skills predicted Grade 7 WQ. Results revealed syntactic growth over time. Grade 6 use of connectives and receptive language skills emerged as predictors of Grade 7 WQ.

中文翻译：

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语言技能在中青少年科学总结中的作用

青春期中期是学术写作语言发展潜力巨大的时期。然而，迄今为止，很少有写作研究探索这一时期的语言发展，甚至更少关注纵向或多样化的样本。在这项研究中，我们研究了从六年级到七年级（n = 124）的社会经济多样化样本中学术写作语言技能的发展。在每个年级，参与者都写了一篇科学课文的摘要。随后，对摘要进行写作质量 (WQ) 评分并分析生产性语言技能（词汇句法和话语特征）。参与者完成了接受性学术语言评估和测量源文本阅读理解的测试。首先，我们检查了 WQ 或生产性语言技能是否随时间发生变化。下一个，我们测试了 6 年级的生产性和接受性语言技能是否预测了 7 年级的 WQ。结果显示随着时间的推移句法增长。6 年级使用连接词和接受性语言技能成为 7 年级 WQ 的预测指标。