Text generation—the mental translation of ideas into language at word, sentence, and discourse levels—involves oral language abilities. However, oral language skills are rarely a target of writing interventions. We ran an intervention to improve fifth and 10th graders’ written production through the development of oral sentence generation (grammatical and syntactic) skills. One hundred and fifteen students—68 fifth graders (four classrooms) and 47 tenth graders (four classrooms)—participated in a stepped-wedge cluster-randomized controlled trial. Two fifth-grade classrooms (n = 35) and two 10th-grade classrooms (n = 20) received nine 90-min sessions (3 weeks, three sessions a week) of oral language intervention immediately after the pretest (experimental groups); the two other fifth- (n = 33) and 10th-grade classrooms (n = 27) received business-as-usual writing instruction and received a delayed oral language intervention after the posttest (waiting list group). The intervention consisted of team-based games to improve oral sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills. We assessed written sentence generation, written sentence reformulation, written text quality (macrostructure and language), and text writing fluency before (pretest) and after (posttest) the intervention and 5 weeks after the intervention (follow-up). The results showed that training on oral sentence generation skills can lead to significant gains in both sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills and text macrostructural quality. Improvement at the sentence level was, however, significant only for the younger writers (fifth graders).

文本生成（即思想在单词，句子和话语级别上的心理转化为语言）涉及口头语言能力。但是，口语技能很少成为写作干预的目标。我们进行了一项干预，通过发展口头句子生成（语法和句法）技能来提高五年级和十年级学生的书面写作水平。115名学生（68名五年级学生（四个教室）和47名十年级学生（四个教室））参加了楔形聚类随机对照试验。两个五年级教室（n  = 35）和两个十年级教室（n = 20）在预测试后立即接受了9次90分钟的疗程（3周，一周3次）（实验组）；另外两个五 年级（n = 33）和十年级教室（n = 27）接受了照常写作指导，并在事后测试（等待名单组）之后接受了延迟的口头语言干预。干预措施包括基于团队的游戏，以提高口头句子生成和句子重构技巧。我们评估了干预之前（预测试）和干预之后（后测试）以及干预后5周（后续）的书面句子生成，书面句子重构，书面文字质量（宏结构和语言）以及文字书写流畅度。结果表明，对口头句子生成技能的培训可以显着提高句子生成，句子重构技能和文本宏观结构质量。但是，句子水平的提高仅对年轻的作家（五年级学生）有意义。